We actually do include Life of Fred as an optional supplement for elementary grades and an alternative core curriculum for high school. My seven-year-old loves it!
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. :)
That's a good idea. Maybe we can include some screenshots in the homepage or How It Works page to give visitors a better idea of what it looks like when you create an account and generate curricula.
Thanks, this is helpful to hear. It's interesting that one of the main pieces of feedback we get is about pricing. Some people say that it is overpriced, others that we should be charging more.
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.
Thanks! I am familiar with some of these and a big fan of The Well-Trained Mind.
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.
That's an interesting idea. Currently there is no financial incentive to pick successful projects, because the entrepreneurs don't receive the repayments personally. We may add something like this in the future.
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.
In the past, default rates have usually fluctuated between 15% and 25%. No country has consistently been higher or lower than the population as a whole.
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.
Yes, my experience in cofounding a Kiva field partner NGO in 2006 was an inspiration for Zidisha. The intent was to reduce the high charges to the entrepreneur inherent in the Kiva model by eliminating field partner organizations and connecting lenders and borrowers directly. This had not been feasible at the time Kiva was founded, due to low internet penetration in developing countries then. (See https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-story-of-zidisha-dram_b_9... for more background.)
The fee is paid by the entrepreneurs as a percentage of each project funded. It covers the cost of transferring funds (credit card and other payment transfer fees, Fx margin we pay when transferring funds internationally) and administering the platform (web hosting, phone and SMS communications with entrepreneurs, etc). At our current scale we are just breaking even with our operating costs covered by the 5% fee.
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
At the moment, we are offering both Pay It Forward projects and traditional loans (where lenders are repaid) to our existing lenders, and showing only the new Pay It Forward projects to new users who sign up. This makes things easier to understand for new users and helps us gather clear feedback on the Pay It Forward concept.