Is technology the most democratizing force mankind has ever seen? That’s how technologist and serial entrepreneur Julie Hanna sees it. We spoke with Hanna at a recent Techonomy dinner salon in San Francisco. She asserted that tech tools have leveled the playing field and “enabled globally fair access on a mass scale.” But she says there’s a lot more to do about what she calls “the global opportunity crisis we face, where half the planet’s population is living on less than $2 a day.” Hanna chairs the board of Kiva, which gives entrepreneurs in poor countries capital through peer-to-peer lending. Through the Kiva platform, which was launched in 2005, nearly 1.5 million entrepreneurs in over 75 countries have received over half a billion dollars in loans, according to Hanna. What’s more, 99 percent of those loans have been repaid. Hanna believes that mobile tech will give lending platforms like Kiva an even greater global reach by creating “a level of directness and a disintermediation we’ve never seen before.”
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Kiva’s Julie Hanna on Tech as a Democratizing Force
Is technology the most democratizing force mankind has ever seen? That's how technologist and serial entrepreneur Julie Hanna sees it. We spoke with Hanna at a recent Techonomy dinner salon in San Francisco. She asserted that tech tools have leveled the playing field and "enabled globally fair access on a mass scale." But she says there's a lot more to do about what she calls "the global opportunity crisis we face, where half the planet's population is living on less than $2 a day."
