Thanks for checking it out! If you sign up, we can notify you by email when we add more destinations.
729 karma · joined February 28, 2013
Re introducing reading separately from writing, this is recommended in The Well-Trained Mind and A Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading and worked well with my two sons. Both learned to read fluently at age four, but needed a couple years beyond that to develop the fine motor skills and attention span needed to form letters well. That said, many kids are ready to write at an earlier age and we try to make it easy for parents to edit the default curriculum and do things like move the first-grade writing component to kindergarten. The main point is that learning to read doesn't need to be coupled with writing.
The typo and awkward phrasing you mentioned are fixed now. :)
To answer your question, we have quite a bit of original content and functionality beyond the book lists and transcripts. And based on my experience assembling customized homeschooling curricula for my kids, the book curation in itself is a major value add. If it saves the parent just a few hours of research time, or connects the student with just a few resources beyond what parents could find on their own, it would be worth the cost for many families.
The main differentiator in a homeschooling curriculum is what the student will spend his/her time doing and reading, and optimizing this seems like it would be worth paying for a service rather than relying on free book lists from the internet. That's our hypothesis, anyway.
Our curriculum uses "Great Books" in a broader sense of quality fiction and nonfiction literature, which includes classical Western literature but also lots of modern and non-Western books.
Optimizing the images is definitely on my to-do list.
Feel free to reach out about partnering. I'm at julia (at) zidisha.org.
From my experience, most people in developing country communities such as our entrepreneurs' routinely act altruistically and give away a much higher percentage of their resources than in industrialized societies.
As a former economics student, I've been constantly surprised by the extent to which simple altruism motivates behavior at Zidisha. The original Zidisha concept was a marketplace based on financial incentives (including interest for the lenders), but most of our users didn't want that.
Projects Funded: 274,507 Amount Lent: $18,723,792 Total Members: 411,728
The loans outstanding are about $1 million, and delinquency rate ranges between 15 and 25% depending on the cohort measured.
Lenders are about half in the US, 40% in Europe, and the rest elsewhere.
Are people really paying it forward? Early data suggest that repayment rates are higher than for loans, and this is expected given that borrowers are more directly involved in the allocation of repaid funds. For loans ended thus far the average optional extra amount paid has been around 20%, enough to offset expected defaults. We won't have statistically robust data on this for several months, as the larger loans take longer to repay.
We handle defaults as described in the FAQ. In addition, the volunteer mentor (experienced borrowers who help vet and orient new members) who was assigned at the time the member joined may call the member to help them establish a payment plan.
The credit risk payments were fees intended to offset default losses under the old system (before the pivot to the Pay It Forward system). We do not apply them anymore. Instead, the optional extra payments deposited to the loan fund once projects are repaid are expected to offset default losses.
The 5% fee does not take away from the loan funds, which are kept separate from operating costs and fees.
For comparison, most traditional microlending programs charge over 20% in fees and interest, and comparable unsecured small business loans in the markets we serve are much more expensive, or not available at all. Since the entrepreneurs are acquiring assets and operating capital they could not otherwise afford and which continue to generate profits after the loan is repaid, the value to them is normally far higher than the 5% cost of the loan.
Here is an aggregator of project updates posted by the entrepreneurs, which gives an idea of the impact of the loans: https://www.zidisha.org/project-updates
Our model has gone through several iterations over the years, and I thought HN might be interested in our latest one! It’s called “Pay it Forward” and the key idea is that entrepreneurs fund new projects by other entrepreneurs instead of repaying lenders directly. Some background on why we arrived at this iteration:
With our traditional microloans, when the borrower repaid their loan, the money went back to the lenders, who then would choose new projects to fund with it. The problem was that funds often went unused for long periods, because many lenders don’t have the time to choose new projects each time repayments come in. We built an automated relending tool to try to address this, but it lacks the ability to vet projects for quality or to provide the human connection that manual lending does. Normally, the lending process involves messaging, photo sharing, and so on, between lenders and entrepreneurs, which is more meaningful for everybody.
The users who typically spend the most time on our platform are the entrepreneurs. Access to loans is often a life-changing opportunity for them, and many choose to give back to the community by serving as Volunteer Mentors - a role that involves vetting new applicants, conducting orientations of new members via WhatsApp, and mentoring newer members as they grow their businesses. They are often best placed to know who is most trustworthy and which projects are good investments. Many have expressed interest in "graduating" from a borrower to a lender on the platform, but up until now we had no mechanism for the entrepreneurs to fund loans. So we’ve built one!
In the new system, projects must be repaid, just like traditional loans. But instead of repaying lenders, the entrepreneurs allocate the repayments to other projects on the platform. The original lenders can track the follow-on projects that are funded by their chosen entrepreneurs, so they get to see how their impact continues to multiply as funds are recycled over and over.
Unlike loans, Pay It Forward projects have no fees or interest other than a 5% service fee to cover money transfer and operating costs. (First-time participants who don't have an invite from an existing member also pay a one-time fee of about $10, which covers the cost of a background check and lifetime membership.) Once projects are repaid, the entrepreneurs can choose to deposit an extra amount of between 0 and 25% of the amount raised to fund other projects in the platform. Their next project fundraising amount limit is then increased by the extra amount they chose to deposit, plus a matching increase from us. (For example, an entrepreneur who raises $100 can choose to repay the $100 then contribute an extra up to $25 to the community. If they contribute an extra $25, then their next fundraising amount is $150.) This enables financial sustainability and growth of the project funding capital, without burdening any entrepreneur who prefers not to make extra payments.
We have opened the Pay It Forward product to the community after a period of beta testing. Early data suggest that repayment performance will be the same or better than that of our traditional loans. Thus far, the majority of entrepreneurs have opted to make some extra payment into the community at the conclusion of their projects.
This is a departure from the traditional P2P lending concept and we're not aware of a similar model being tried elsewhere. I'm very interested to hear your ideas and feedback in the thread, and you are always welcome to contact me at julia@zidisha.org!
The Members Loan Fund deposit may be withdrawn at any time the borrower does not have an outstanding loan. It may also be used to pay off the remaining balance of an outstanding loan, if the borrower requests it. If the loan goes into arrears, it is used to reimburse lenders for the amount they had lent.
The lifetime membership fee is currently zero, but at the time this borrower joined, it was 10% of the starting credit limit chosen by the applicant. (So someone choosing the default starting credit limit of $10 would pay a lifetime membership fee of $1.)
The above costs are only paid once, at the time a borrower first joins Zidisha, and entitle the borrower to lifetime access to raise loans. You can learn more about why we developed a lending model that front-loads costs here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julia-kurnia/the-story-of-zidi...
The 5% service fee is a flat percentage of each loan amount, and is independent of the loan term. If Ms. Mwangi opts to hold the loan for two years, she would still pay only $25.47.
We'll aim to make this clearer in the cost breakdown explanation. Thanks again!
It's illustrative to browse through the loan recipients' own progress updates: https://www.zidisha.org/project-updates
In case it didn't come through clearly enough in the article, I should reiterate that the YC partners and my batchmates were super supportive and often went out of their way to make it easier for me to participate in YC events - offering rides, allowing Adam to tag along with me at office hours, helping to entertain him, and generally being extraordinarily patient and welcoming.