Kiva Crowdsourced Due Diligence App
Code Final ProductLeverage volunteers to more quickly review loan applications from sustainable social organizations worldwide. (Fall 2014)
Technologies used: HTML (for front-end), CSS (for front-end), JS/JQuery (for front-end), Node/Express (for web-app framework), MongoDB (for database)
About the Project
Kiva came to us with the goal of building an app that would allow them to more quickly approve loans to entrepreneurs around the world. With the recent addition of Kiva Zip, a new Kiva product that allows non-traditional lending institutions (such as churches and schools), Kiva was receiving thousands of loan applications and needed a process by which to crowd-source application reading.
About the Client: Kiva
Kiva is a non-profit organization with a mission to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty. Leveraging the internet and a worldwide network of microfinance institutions, Kiva lets individuals lend as little as $25 to help create opportunity around the world.
You can find a link to their website here.


Impact
At the end of the semester, we handed the project off to the engineering team of Kiva, who will integrate it with their systems and deploy it in the coming year. Kiva’s https://github.com/kiva/crowdvet/ repository forked from Hack4Impact’s repository.
The Team
Fall 2014 Team members:
Features
Gamification to help incentivize volunteers to continue working
Document viewer so that each loan application could be viewed as the review was being completed
Dashboard for administrators to quickly see aggregated statistics per loan application
Question upvote mechanisms for volunteers to determine what other information would be useful in evaluating the loan
Training/Resources for volunteers
Technical Challenges
Beyond just reviewing loan applications, the “Crowdsourced Due Diligence App” needed to be a useful tool for Kiva administrators and create an effective user experience for volunteers. We sat down with a few Kiva members who gave us a detailed spec of how to accomplish those two goals.
Press
Student organization connects non-profits with app development