Business students at Saint Anselm College are using capitalism and the Internet to help people lift themselves out of poverty in the developing world.
In just a year, students have generated 180 micro-loans totaling more than $4,500 to small-scale entrepreneurs in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America. Students use viral marketing to encourage their classmates, professors and family members to raise the number of loans to 300 by the end of the 2008-2009 academic year.
The vehicle for lending is Kiva, a Web site that puts people with as little as $25 to lend in touch with bakers, jewelry makers, farmers, shopkeepers and peanut butter producers around the world who need capital to make their businesses grow. The loans are repaid within three to 28 months and lenders have the option of making new loans with the money.
“It is an unbelievable opportunity for a college student to be able to make an impact and help someone overseas,” says Thomas Cullen ’09, who leads the micro-lending project for the organization SIFE, Students in Free Enterprise.
Thomas Fitzpatrick, assistant professor of business and economics, introduced Kiva to his international business management class, as well as to SIFE, which he advises.
“I believe in the transformational power of capitalism and the free market,” he says. “I believe that, combined with democracy, is the future of the free world.”
He sees Kiva as a way for students to make direct foreign investments, while also doing good for others. He encourages students to set investment criteria in the same way a multi-national corporation would. “It’s such a beautiful use of technology that allows individuals to interact with each other over tens of thousands of miles and to be engaged with each other,” says Fitzpatrick.
Cullen immediately saw the value of the project when Fitzpatrick presented it to SIFE. “It had both a community service aspect and it had a business aspect to it,” he says. “I said this is a great chance. I’m going for it.”
Since then, SIFE has held three symposia on micro-lending and used e-mail messages to encourage others to invest.
Fitzpatrick himself is on his second round of loans. The first seven loans he made were repaid in the fall and we reinvested the money. He is attracted to people who are trying to improve their family’s circumstances, such as a man in Tajikistan who is a refugee of ethnic civil war.
Cullen prefers to lend to female entrepreneurs, such as the Mexican woman who wanted to buy a refrigerator for her market. “In some of these impoverished countries, women don’t have the same rights it that women have here,” he says. “To empower them to go ahead and be entrepreneurs is fulfilling to me.”