The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

by Kevin Kelly

Why stop there? Who would have believed that poor farmers could secure $100 loans shared from perfect strangers on the other side of the planet—and pay them back? That is what Kiva does with peer-to-peer lending. Several decades ago international banks discovered they had better repayment rates when they lent small amounts to the poor than when they lent big amounts to rich state governments. It was safer to lend money to the peasants in Bolivia than to the government of Bolivia. This microfinancing of a few hundred dollars applied many tens of thousands of times would also jump-start a developing economy from the bottom. Loan a poor woman $95 to buy supplies to launch a street food cart and the benefits of her stable income would ripple up through her children, the local economy, and quickly build a base for more complex startups. It was the most efficient development strategy invented yet. Kiva took the next step in sharing and turned microfinancing into peer-to-peer lending by enabling anyone, anywhere to make a microfinance loan. So you, sitting at Starbucks, could now lend $120 to a specific individual Bolivian woman who plans to buy wool to start a weaving business. You could follow her progress until she paid you back, at which time you could relend the money to someone else. Since Kiva’s launch in 2005, over 2 million people have lent more than $725 million in microfinance loans via its sharing platform. The payback rate is about 99 percent. That is a strong encour...