Just two weeks prior to Thanksgiving break, Hampden-Sydney College welcomed Jessica Jackley, co-founder of the astoundingly popular not-for-profit website, Kiva.org, to speak in Crawley Forum. Kiva is an explosive, avant-garde micro-lending enterprise, which enables users to invest in the productive projects of entrepreneurs who hail from a wide range of developing countries. To register on the site is a simple and free process, and the loan minimum–a mere twenty-five dollars–opens up this prolific opportunity to the vast majority of internet users. In essence, Kiva.org drastically reduces the transaction cost of lending money to entrepreneurs in underdeveloped countries.

In 2004, Jessica visited East Africa and saw firsthand the injured spirits of men and women who longed to provide for their own families, but who truly could not escape the tribulations of day-to-day survival long enough to garner momentum. Amongst the crippled governments and remote settlements, Jackley came to realize that many of the people she was meeting had entrepreneurial drives which rivaled those of Western capitalists! Pamphlets and documentation could not have prepared her for what she encountered in Africa. It was not until she hit the ground, opened her eyes to the glaring realities, and opened her ears to stories of real people, that Jackley was able to grasp the scope of the problem. She returned to America, more determined than ever to take-up arms against poverty. Her solution was a website which would serve not as a vehicle for donations to the poor, but as an open forum for lending to the willing and able.

Kiva’s mission contrasts sharply with the notion of a donation. To be blunt, as Jessica poignantly recognized during her talk, Kiva’s mission contrasts sharply with the very way in which we as Americans perceive the poor. Our roots having been saturated in nationwide prosperity, the oft-held belief that charitable donation to the less-fortunate is the preeminent moral avenue is easily defensible–at least, in the face of doing nothing at all. Ask yourself, would you prefer giving a man a fish to teaching him how to catch his own? Better yet, imagine yourself as the head of an impoverished family. Do you count on sporadic alms to care for loved ones, never certain that you will be provided for next week? Or would you prefer to establish yourself in the marketplace, setting the foundation for a prosperous, more certain future?

There is no doubt that Jessica Jackley is an idealist; nevertheless, she is a down-to-earth achiever who has come to realize the importance of flexibility over static goals and inert patterns of thought. Jessica set out for Africa with a solid idea of how she wanted to help the poor: She left with a realistic picture of what actually needed to happen. Indeed, Kiva channels upwards of $100 million each year into developing countries, and cultivates real connections between real lenders and recipients who perhaps could not have otherwise known just how similar they were. This is precisely the message that Jessica hopes to convey with her organization–that each and every one of us is an entrepreneur, with plans and purposes of his own. And each of us has a story to tell.