This Week in Education: Microfinance
by Ashley Best
Re-Vision Labs Fellow
Need the current scoop on education in the United States? Check out these links!
Week of January 4th – 8th, 2010
MICROFINANCE: Microfinance week at RVL is upon us! (Go check it out!) In the most broad of terms, microfinance refers to a movement that envisions low-income households having the permanent support of, and access to, high quality financial services to help reduce poverty. More narrowly, this term refers to loans and and financial services provided by mircofinance institutions to low-income clients. How does this effect education one may ask? A cornerstone of alleviating poverty lies in the opportunity to provide education. This crucial fact has spurred many microfinance institutions to focus on providing education loans and creating educational focus. ETC.
Viattana connects you, the lender, with students who need your help.
1. Vittana – Based in Seattle (yay!), Vittana makes it possible for person-to-person loans to go directly from the public to a student. 100% of the money you loan to Vittana goes to a high achieving student that needs an education loan, and as the student pays Vittana back, Vittana pays you! Pretty cool. Student profiles are uploaded to the site so people can see exactly who your money is going to! This is a great way to help finance someone’s education!
2. Janta – Down the coast in San Francisco, Janta offers the possibility of educational loans or gifts. This organization provides student profiles and academic progress reports to the financial donors, providing proof that education works to alleciate poverty and provide opportunity one person at a time. Donations can be made to Janta through gifts, that are tax deductible through the charitable organization Namaste Foundation, or through lending, that will be repaid by Janta’s microfinance institution when funds are repaid by the student.
How does Janta work, you ask?
3. Focus on Children – A faculty member at the University of Huston reviews a study that proposes to add a children’s education fund on to the microfinance loans made to clients. When clients pay back their loans, small business loans or otherwise, a portion of the repaid money goes into a fund that is reserved for their child’s education. It focuses on the possibilities of existing mircofinance institutions adding educational lending and program updates to their current offerings.
4. Stories from the Field – Kiva, another institution implementing mircofinance loans, has a fellows program that serves the purpose of documenting the lives of the working poor. This blog is very informative and gives supreme insight to the populations that can benefit from all kinds of mircofinance loans and gifts. This particular post explores how women in the Philippines have used loans to better their standards of living, allowing their children to be free to attend better schools in other cities, attend college and have opportunities that they would otherwise never have been able to experience. While this example is not based in the United States, it speaks to the power of microfinance and the inherent ties between education and alleviation of poverty.
REMEMBER: RVL’s is hosting the Seattle Greendrinks and Oikocredit kick-off event on January 12th at 5:30pm. See you there!
Check back for next week’s hot topic! Education is empowering. Enjoy the week.
Similar Posts:
- Microfinance in the US: Harvard and Hardware?
- Microfinance Week at RVL!
- Oikocredit: The Eye of the Microfinance Storm
