Kiva Capital is an asset manager that supports underserved communities with impact-first capital. Established in 2019 as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the nonprofit kiva.org, Kiva Capital envisions a financially inclusive world where everyone, regardless of socioeconomic status, has access to capital and the opportunities that come with it. By leveraging Kiva’s unique global network of financial services providers and social enterprises, Kiva Capital facilitates deep financial inclusion impact alongside conscientious financial stewardship.
Kiva Capital
Unlocking impact investments for financial inclusion
Scaling Kiva’s mission
Kiva Capital helps scale Kiva’s mission: to increase financial access to help underserved communities thrive. Through thematically focused impact funds, Kiva Capital provides debt investments to mission-aligned financial service providers and social enterprises supporting underserved populations. By actively addressing challenges faced by communities often left out of traditional markets, Kiva Capital particularly focuses on reaching refugees, marginalized U.S. entrepreneurs, women, and climate-threatened communities.
Partner with Kiva Capital
Working on a global scale requires collaboration among diverse stakeholders. Kiva Capital partners with a wide range of domestic and international institutions to advance shared goals, including corporations, philanthropic institutions, impact investors, international initiatives, financial service providers, social enterprises, and government agencies.
Investing in refugees & people impacted by forced displacement
Kiva Refugee Investment Fund
Over 122 million people are displaced from their homes worldwide. Unfortunately, a recent study found that this number could exceed 1 billion by 2050. Though immediate humanitarian aid is critical for refugee communities, economic opportunity is needed for longer-term stability. Yet, most refugees cannot access financial services. Mobilizing institutional capital through the Kiva Refugee Investment Fund (KRIF), Kiva Capital is growing refugee lending and supporting displaced populations in emerging markets while generating financial returns for investors. Having deployed over $60 million to 75,000 individuals, KRIF builds on kiva.org’s work demonstrating that refugee financing is a viable and impact-first investment strategy.
Investing in small business resilience
Micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) represent about 90% of businesses and more than 50% of employment worldwide.¹ However, MSMEs in emerging markets and developing countries cite access to capital as a key constraint for growth — especially given constraints induced by the COVID-19 pandemic.² By launching two innovative COVID-19 response vehicles, Kiva Capital channeled low-cost capital to small businesses in critical need of support during the ongoing pandemic, both domestically and in emerging markets. From Lagos to Los Angeles, Kiva Capital recognizes that financial access for small businesses is fundamental for thriving communities and economies.
Small Business Resilience Fund
In 2020, Kiva Capital partnered with Google to launch the Small Business Resilience Fund (SBRF) in order to provide crucial capital to financial services providers impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Fund facilitates a critical flow of capital to MSMEs affected by the COVID-19 crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia. Kiva Capital recognizes that enabling small business access to capital is critical to supporting our global economy. Even as countries financially recover and the effects of the pandemic subside, continued SBRF funding ensures that investees are resilient in addressing the impacts that any major crisis — not just COVID-19 — can have on poverty and economic development.
California Rebuilding Fund
Kiva Capital is the administrator of The California Rebuilding Fund, which aims to address the capital and advisory needs of California’s small businesses following the COVID-19 health and economic crisis. With a particular focus on historically under-resourced communities, the Rebuilding Fund has provided over $80 million in affordable capital to 1,385 small businesses that support over 7,000 local jobs across 40 counties in California. The majority of loans from the Rebuilding Fund went to businesses located in low-to-moderate income communities.
Supporting underbanked women
Financial inclusion is essential to gender equity, which is in turn essential to prosperous households and economies. Since its inception, Kiva has facilitated loans to over 4 million women around the world. And while it's important to reach more women with life-changing financial services, we believe it's equally important to ensure those services are effective. That’s why we’re committed to deepening our understanding of the barriers women face. With that knowledge, we can drive institutional change and create better services that enable greater economic participation for women, leading to stronger communities and economies.
In 2023, Kiva launched the Gender Equity Assessment Rating (GEAR) tool to understand how well an organization promotes and integrates gender equity across its products, practices, policies, and power structures. Kiva is committed to using GEAR to advance and mainstream gender equity across our investment portfolio and the broader financial system. Kiva’s goal? To advance gender equity, ensuring more meaningful inclusion for women worldwide. Learn more about the gaps and opportunities in the gender lens investing landscape that Kiva has identified, or explore Kiva’s impact for women.
Leading with impact
Kiva Capital is proud to have been selected to the ImpactAssets 50 Emerging Impact Manager list for 2025. The IA 50 represents a diverse group of impact fund managers recognized for demonstrated potential to create positive impact. “The IA 50 not only reflects where impact investing is today, but also provides a roadmap for its future. The rigorous selection process and expert review that define the IA 50 reinforce its position as the industry’s gold standard – giving investors confidence that the firms featured are at the forefront of driving meaningful impact.”
— Rehana Nathoo, IA 50 Review Committee Member, Founder and CEO, Spectrum Impact
At Kiva Capital, our commitment to impact is integrated into every step of the investment life cycle and is supported by our robust proprietary impact measurement and management systems. Kiva Capital is a signatory to the Operating Principles for Impact Management (OPIM), a framework that consists of nine principles designed to promote transparency and accountability, establish common standards, enhance investor confidence, and drive continuous improvement in the impact investing sector toward true and measurable impact. Kiva Capital’s outlined commitment to robust impact measurement and management can be found in our 2024 OPIM Disclosure Statement. Kiva Capital’s Operating Principles were designed to ensure that our activities positively impact the communities we serve. We are proud to share that our Operating Principles successfully completed a rigorous third-party verification process, with verification results that serve as a testament to Kiva's commitment to thoughtful transparency and accountability throughout our underwriting and impact practices.
Leveraging Kiva’s global network
Kiva Capital leverages Kiva's 20-year history of investing experience and partnerships with organizations that meaningfully increase financial access for underserved populations. Since its founding, Kiva has facilitated over $2 billion in capital to over 5 million people, and has underwritten 200+ financial service providers and 190 social enterprises. The Kiva team is located in strategic regions around the globe and operates in over 60 countries. Leveraging Kiva’s well-established global network, Kiva Capital makes private debt investments in FSPs and innovative social enterprises (SEs) operating in emerging markets that are committed to delivering meaningful financial services and products to underserved populations. Often, these mission-oriented FSPs and SEs serve as the first providers of basic services to the underserved entrepreneurs and small businesses that drive job creation in emerging markets.
Kiva Capital investment spotlight: Microfund for Women
Microfunds for Women (MFW) is a microfinance institution in Jordan working to facilitate credit access for underserved women entrepreneurs in Jordan. In 2017, MFW posted their first loan on Kiva.org, leveraging the crowdfunding platform as part of their pilot program to become the first MFI in Jordan to lend to Syrian refugees. MFW successfully funded over 1,000 Syrian refugee borrowers on Kiva.org, demonstrating the viability of lending to displaced populations. As the organization became the main source of financial services for Syrian refugees in Jordan, investing in MFW through the Kiva Refugee Investment Fund (KRIF) was a welcome next step for the partnership. In 2023, KRIF disbursed $4 million to MFW to scale their work with Syrian refugees in both camps and urban areas, as well as serve impacted host communities throughout the country. This investment ensures that MFW will be able to to reach an estimated 4,500+ individuals looking to rebuild their lives in their new home.
Deepening impact through capacity building
Kiva Capital pairs investments with capacity-building support to increase impact, which strengthens investees' operations, services, and products. Capacity-building includes digitization, new product design, data analysis, business training, client protection policies, and more. These services equip Kiva Capital lending partners to better support their customers and deepen their impact in the communities they serve.
Capacity building spotlight: UGAFODE
In partnership with Mercy Corps, Kiva conducted a needs assessment in 2023 with three Ugandan lending partners and their refugee clients — one of which was Kiva Capital investee, UGAFODE. The primary challenge identified by refugees in Uganda seeking financial services was the lack of branch facilities near their settlements. To directly address this challenge, Kiva partnered with the Hilton Foundation to provide UGAFODE with capacity building support to establish a sales center in the Kyangwali refugee settlement. By opening a sales center in a location highly accessible to refugees, UGAFODE seeks to increase its outreach, provide financial literacy opportunities, and continue to scale its ability to serve refugees across Uganda.
Meet some members of the Kiva Capital team
Joel Hughey
Senior Director, Impact
With over 20 years of experience working in international development in strategy, monitoring, evaluation, and research, Joel is passionate about impact. He has led organizational change efforts to drive greater impact and managed multi-disciplinary teams focused on capturing, translating, and communicating evidence of impact to stakeholders and partners.
Prior to joining Kiva, Joel spent over 15 years at World Vision, most recently serving as the Senior Director, Evidence Building and Research, where he provided strategic leadership, management, and coordination for building the global evidence for World Vision’s child well-being. Prior to World Vision, Joel served as a project manager for World Relief. Joel has a Master's Degree in International Development from Tulane University, and has lived and worked in Ethiopia and Kenya leading community development efforts in rural, underserved communities.
Nicolas Lafaye
Senior Director, Kiva Capital
Nicolas serves as the Senior Director of Investments overseeing Kiva Capital Funds, the Kiva Refugee Investment Fund (KRIF) and the Kiva Small Business Resilience Fund (SBRF). Since joining Kiva in 2010, Nicolas has been an Investment Manager for South America and Southeast Asia and the Pacific as well as Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean and head of Kiva's Social Enterprise investment program. Prior to Kiva, Nicolas spent two and a half years in Hong Kong working for Société Générale Investment Bank. He is a native French speaker and also fluent in Spanish. He holds a Master’s degree in International Affairs from the Dauphine University Paris, France.
Lev Plaves
Investment Director, Kiva Capital
Lev leads Kiva’s work globally catalyzing loans to refugees and displaced populations, including serving as portfolio manager of the Kiva Refugee Investment Fund (KRIF).
Lev joined Kiva in 2012 managing the Middle East portfolio and was originally based in Istanbul, Turkey. Lev spearheaded the launch of Kiva’s work with refugees in 2016, utilizing the crowdfunding platform to demonstrate the viability of lending to displaced populations. Prior to Kiva, Lev spent three years in Palestine, where he worked for a multi-million dollar USAID project.
Lev holds a Bachelor’s degree in political science from Wesleyan University and speaks Arabic.
Lina Ramírez
Investment Director, Latin America
Lina Ramírez joined Kiva in 2020 as an Investment Manager covering El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Chile, and Colombia. Lina brings over 16 years of Financial Industry experience to the Kiva Capital team.
Prior to joining Kiva, Lina worked at the Financial Superintendence of Colombia, where she supervised the largest conglomerate in the country. There, she led the authorization of licenses for all new institutions plus mergers and acquisitions in the financial sector. Before that, Lina served as the Director of Debt for LAC at Incofin, a Belgium-based Microfinance Investment Manager, where she covered investments in financial service providers and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the agriculture sector. Lina started her career at Citibank Colombia in the corporate risk and the financial institutions groups.
Lina holds an MBA from Vlerick Business School, Belgium, and an undergraduate degree in industrial engineering with a minor in finance.
David Kitusa
Director, Business Development Africa
David Kitusa is Kiva’s Regional Representative for Anglophone Africa. As the regional representative, David is responsible for driving Kiva’s expansion and growth strategy by exploring new partner relationships, working and strengthening the existing ones, and building Kiva’s regional presence. David has over 20 years of progressive wealth experience in microfinance and impact investment, both at operational and policy levels.
Prior to Kiva, David served as the former acting Chief Executive Officer at AMFI, where he successfully spearheaded the turnaround of the association, as well as assisted with fundraising, strategic planning, coordination, and establishing linkages with external stakeholders.
David was instrumental in drafting and advocating for the passage of the Microfinance Act of 2006.
Barrett Redmond
Associate, Investor Relations
Barrett joined Kiva in 2022 as the Investor Relations Associate and is responsible for supporting Kiva Capital’s client services, fundraising efforts, and gender strategy.
Prior to joining Kiva Capital, she worked on global development issues related to gender and access to financial services at Grameen Foundation, and served as a Community Economic Development Peace Corps volunteer in rural Paraguay.
Barrett holds a Master of Development Practice (MDP) from U.C. Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, and a B.S. in businesses and enterprise management from Wake Forest University.
Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) Finance, The World Bank, https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/smefinance
Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) Finance, The World Bank, https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/smefinance
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