A couple nights ago I went to another great Microfinance & Microbrews event here in Seattle hosted by my friends over an SeaMO.  Besides seeing friends and other people passionate about microfinance, Adnan Mahmud, the founder and CEO of Jolkona, gave a presentation about his organization.  I have to admit, that although they are from my own backyard, I didn’t know too much about Jolkona.  After Adnan’s presentation, I was very impressed with what Jolkona was doing.  Kiva was one of the pioneers with microfinace lending platforms, which then led to different variations suchs as Vittana (providing loans for students), United Prosperity (guaranteeing loans), and MicroPlace (giving interest on loans).  Jolkona take it another step further by addressing two big problems that have arisen:
1. Donors often lack feedback on how our small donations are implemented.
2. Donors are faced with a plethora of options without easy ways to determine which charities are the best ones to trust with our money.
Jolkona uses the concept of micro-donations as a form of supporting microfinance.  “Jolkona Foundation makes it easy for you to give directly to low-cost, high-impact  philanthropic opportunities around the world. We work with carefully chosen partner organizations to create affordable donation options with a measurable impact, from planting trees in Honduras to providing food and housing for an HIV-positive child in Cambodia. 100% of your donation goes to the project you’ve chosen.”
Jolkona uses a simple yet efective model to help it’s recipients:

Choose projects
You pick the partner projects to support based on your own preferences such as country, category, and cost.

Give to projects
Give to your chosen projects through the Jolkona website using our simple checkout process.

See the impact
Receive an update on how your gift has been distributed. Jolkona Foundation is committed to showing the impact of every gift. We work hard with our partners to create a proof of impact that is easy to implement and meaningful to you.

Do More
Share your giving experience with your friends and family, and encourage them to also make a difference today.

It was great to hear about Jolkona, I think that it offers more diveristy to the world of microfinance and gives people another option.

First of all, let me be the 2nd person to welcome you to myKRO.org! I’ve written about microfinance numerous times on my personal blog over the past year, but I fully anticipate the majority of my microfinance-related content will be written here at myKRO.org from now on. With that said, for those of you that read my blog, you’ll know there was a panel discussion at the University of Washington relating to microfinance tonight. The panelists all had a tremendous amount of experience with microfinance:

• Rick Beckett, CEO of Global Partnerships
• Peter Bladin, VP of Grameen Foundation and Director of Grameen Technology Center
• Terry Provance, Executive Director of Oikocredit USA
• Sangita Sigdyal, Deputy Director of the Microcredit Summit Campaign
• Carol Welch, former U.S. Coordinator of the U.N. Millennium Campaign

The panel discussion was moderated by Penny LeGate from KiroTV and sponsored by the Puget Sound Millennium Goals Project and the Center for Global Studies of the Jackson School at the University of Washington.

The discussion touched on a number of topics that we intend to explore in more depth here at myKRO in the coming months — including the different tiers of microloans (1, 2, and 3), the different types of social enterprises (financial services provider, integrated services provider, community wealth creator, and next social enterprise), the fact that Latin America has roughly 60 million potential borrowers, yet is only serving 9 million borrowers now, and Mifos.

However, in the meantime, I wanted to share several photos from the event: