What We Do: We help You Invest in a Real Student

Janta's mission is to alleviate extreme poverty by increasing access to education. With your help, we enable poor families to invest in their own education through microloans and scholarships for primary, secondary, and vocational education. Our goal is to make education microfinance widely accessible and affordable, with an emphasis on small loans and scholarships for high-need and high-potential students. We believe education pays, which is why it is the one of the best self-help strategies in the struggle to escape poverty.

We empower you to invest in an actual student by funding her education microloan or scholarship with a small loan or a gift. All of the students on our website are real children, youth, or adults who have applied for a loan or have been recommended for a scholarship by our field partners. 100% of your investment goes directly to educate the specific student you choose, rather than to a regional or global program that indirectly benefits the student. Your support will make a huge impact in the student's life, enabling her to complete her education and increase her lifetime earnings. Whether you choose a loan or a gift, the student will be expected to provide academic progress reports to you via our corresponding field partner.

Our field partners are local educational and microfinance institutions that manage the microloan and/or scholarship programs. These organizations identify deserving students and handle loan applications, disbursements, repayments, and academic reports. They recover their costs by charging market-based or subsidized interest rates for microloans; the subsidized rates are made possible by your gifts. Costs of operating scholarship programs as well as Janta's own operational costs are covered by a portion of your tax-deductible donations and gifts. By investing in a Janta student you are not only helping her take the first steps out of poverty, you are also supporting the local people and organizations that make the microloan possible for high-need families.

We trust you to select students who deserve your support and invite you to monitor their academic progress. Please keep in mind that you take several risks with your interest-free loan in order to educate these students, risks that most banks, microfinance institutions, and even NGOs are unwilling to take. For example, you the lender bear the risk of losing all or part of your loan due to student defaults, currency fluctuations, or a range of other reasons. Shifting this risk to lenders is essential to the program as to not place undue burden on the poor families struggling to pay for education. Diversifying the risk across many small lenders is what makes this innovative program possible. While our field partners try to minimize risk and use a variety of safeguards to ensure that loans are repaid on time, we ask you to not invest more than you can afford to lose and also diversify your investment across multiple students, multiple field partners, and multiple countries. When your loan is repaid, you can choose to withdraw it, re-lend it, or donate it.

We hope you enjoy the experience of supporting education for aspiring students!