Kiva has announced a partnership with TripAdvisor that will see the travel review site donate $250,000 (more than £155,000) to the microlending platform.
The partnership has been hailed as the joining of crowdfunding and crowd sourcing by TripAdvisor, which provides travel advice based on thousands of traveller reviews of hotels, countries, restaurants and experiences.
It will work by TripAdvisor emailing people who have written reviews of countries where Kiva operates, offering to make $25 (£15) microloan on their behalf to a Kiva entrepreneur in the country they reviewed.
Over the course of one year, TripAdvisor will reinvest repayments made by the entrepreneurs to make more loans and at the end of the year donate all the repayments to Kiva.
Kiva works by enabling users to provide $25 microloans towards a potential borrower’s target, when the money is paid back users can reinvest in another person, or have it returned to them. People looking for finance through Kiva have a page which explains how much they need, what it will used for and tracks how much has been lent. The site was launched in 2005, operates in 66 countries and has so far funded more than $375m in loans with a 99 per cent repayment rate.
TripAdvisor heard Kiva’s founder speak at a conference and approached the microfinance site with the partnership concept. The company’s chief marketing officer Barbara Messing said: “We’re delighted to be able to provide our community with a way of giving back to the communities they travelled to.”
Premal Shah, president of Kiva (pictured left) said: “This partnership combines the power of TripAdvisor’s crowdsourcing and Kiva’s crowdfunding to make meaningful change in the world.”
He added: “Through this partnership, the affinity you develop for the people and places you visit can continue when you return home.”
TripAdvisor is offering the microloan gifts for the first review of a country that each individual has submitted to its English-language sites (US, UK, Canada, Ireland and Australia) - so there is no advantage to submitting multiple reviews.
