It's a pretty similar model, but yes with most loans on Kiva, the field partner pre-disburses the loan to the recipient and then lenders backfill the loan. The

It's a pretty similar model, but yes with most loans on Kiva, the field partner pre-disburses the loan to the recipient and then lenders backfill the loan. The idea is that this will give field partners some "market" feedback on what kind of loans lenders wish to fund, although obviously there's an education aspect here, because new lenders may not know that some loans may be more impactful at alleviating poverty than others, though either way they are free to choose. As you say, obviously you wouldn't want to do this with medical donations where people's lives are on the line, but it does work pretty well at Kiva I think to provide some inspiration to our field partners to find the most impactful and catalytic loans. That's about 90% of the loans, and then about 10% are post-disbursed only getting funded if Kiva lenders fund them. Then we have Kiva Zip which is true peer-to-peer, for cases when a field partner is not necessary such as working with mobile payments in Kenya or some borrowers here in the U.S. http://zip.kiva.org http://zip.kiva.org