We are recruiting for new members for Fall 2021! Learn more

Kiva Crowdsourced Due Diligence App

Code Final Product

Leverage 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.

Dashboard for administrators to quickly see aggregated statistics per loan application Loan application review

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:

Dhruv Maheshwari
Project Manager
Alex Harelick
Yoni Nachmany
Rodrigo Ornelas
Arman Tokanov

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

Computer Science for a Cause