How Social Networking Can Propel Social Change
For Emilia, a wisp of a 35-year-old single mother with firm eyes, an online profile was the difference between providing for her family or going hungry.
Emilia has run a small bakery in Ghana for 16 years, her Kiva profile says, baking bread and other pastries to support her two children. But the recent increase in food prices has made it difficult for her to buy raw materials like flour or sugar. She needed $575 to stay in business and survive.
Her cause was taken by Sinapi Aba Trust (SAT), a local Ghanaian microfinance and business training organization. SAT posted Emilia’s story onto the web, and less than a day later, $575 was collected. The lenders? 12 unique individuals from around the world—a “Laurent D” in Brussels, a “Scott and Gretchen” in California.
Emilia’s profile is one of more than 100,000 currently on Kiva, a San Francisco-based non-profit website that combines microlending with the common accessibility of Web 2.0. Founded in 2005, Kiva empowers individuals to lend peer-to-peer to entrepreneurs in developing areas around the globe. According to its own statistics, more than 570,000 individuals from 184 countries have made nearly $96 million in loans through Kiva’s website over the past 3 years.
Kiva effectively demonstrates how social networking can be used to propel social change. For them, social media is not a Facebook page or a Twitter feed. Instead, social media facilitates a two-way interaction, person-to-person, connecting villages with coffee-shops and everywhere in between. Social media empowers one individual to touch another’s life, remotely, via Kiva and the web.
“What we call people so often distances us from them and makes them little,” observed Jacqueline Novogratz, founder of Acumen Fund and a leading voice on poverty alleviation. That rings true for all of communications today. With social networking, the traditional wall between “us” and “them”—regardless of whether “them” referred to a company’s customers or the unseen poor—only serves to alienate. Social networking partners us all in a global venture, and together, we achieve greater success.
For Emilia, that success continues with a $575 loan through Kiva. A repayment plan has been put in place—a set amount over 6 months, held accountable by SAT. Life goes on. And in a small town in Ghana, a bakery of a 35-year-old single mother now has 12 international partners.
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