Wokai
How Does Wokai Work?
Click below to watch a video on how Wokai works.
Wokai's on-the-ground team evaluates and monitors Field Partners responsible for distributing contributions and collecting repayments from recipients in rural China. We use the steps below to ensure that all contributions have the desired impact.
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Wokai's due-diligence team visits, evaluates, and trains our microfinance Field Partners. Our Investment Committee must approve all new partnerships. |
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Our Field Partners screen and select recipients in their local communities, then post their profiles on our website. |
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Contributors (like you!) browse through their profiles, and make tax deductible donations to fund their loans. These tax deductions are valid in the United States of America, per our 501(c)3 status.
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Wokai distributes this money to our Field Partner for allocation to recipients.
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Field Partners collect loan repayments from recipients, and send updates to Wokai about their progress. |
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Once the loan is fully repaid, contributors may reinvest their contributions to help fund a new recipient's loan.
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Contributors actively choose which borrower receives their reinvested contributions for 3 years.
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| (8) | After 3 years, in order to keep down translation and administrative costs, the reinvested contributions are pooled into a long-term loan capital fund utilized by Wokai’s Field Partner to provide new loans, year after year, to impoverished borrowers. Wokai actively monitors this fund to ensure that all reinvested contributions are perpetually used as microloan capital. Wokai continues to provide contributors with comprehensive updates and statistics showing the impact of this long-term Wokai microloan fund. |
Want to learn more about the process? Visit our Help Center.
If you are interested in learning more about Wokai, we invite you to watch this presentation that Wokai's Co-Founder and CEO, Casey Wilson, gave at Google or click on the logos below to check out some of our recent media features.
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We're Hiring!
We need your help to find a Lead Developer, Marketing & Product Management Director, & Executive Fellow that will help us reach $1 million in loan capital by 2011.
Our Mission
Wokai is committed to enabling people in rural China to lift themselves from poverty.
Our Name
我开 wo3kai1: I start [an enterprise]. “Wo kai” refers to starting a business, the opportunity that our organization provides to Chinese microentrepreneurs
Our Story
Wokai was founded in the Spring of 2007 by Casey Wilson and Courtney McColgan, two young women who met while studying Chinese at Tsinghua University. In their travels between rural and urban China, they witnessed the injustice of China’s burgeoning income gap. Microfinance offered a solution, empowering the poor to work their way towards financial independence. With as small as $150, a borrower can start her own business, accumulate savings, and eventually earn a stable income to pay for education, healthcare, and other services. Moved by the cause, they decided to commit their lives to augmenting this type of positive change in China.
Wokai Today
Wokai is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with offices in Oakland, California and Beijing China. Since launching our website in November 2008, Wokai has already raised over US$120,000 in contributed loan capital and empowered over 240 borrowers in China to start small businesses. Wokai has launched 2 Field Partners in Inner Mongolia and rural Sichuan and has built a global community of over 1,000 contributors, 6 flagship Chapters in Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, San Francisco, Seattle, and New York, 150 volunteers worldwide, and a core team in Beijing and California. We have also received tremendous media success with features in Newsweek, MSNBC, CNBC, Bloomberg Asia, CCTV, and Phoenix TV.