China has expe­ri­enced great eco­nomic growth in recent years, but the growth has largely been con­cen­trated in the cities. Rural China has expe­ri­enced lit­tle if any of the eco­nomic growth. So, yes there is a need for micro­cre­dit in the country.

Two young entre­pre­neurs have started a micro­cre­dit ven­ture to pro­vide loans to the 200 mil­lion in China who are still in poverty. Wokai or “I Start” has a web­site that fea­tures peer-to-peer lend­ing sim­i­lar to Kiva.

From MSNBC, reporter Ed Flana­gan tells us more about micro­cre­dit ven­ture. A video with one it’s founders is fea­tured after the jump.

Founded eight months ago by 25-year-olds, Casey Wil­son and Court­ney McCol­gan, Wokai is the con­ver­gence of the pair’s shared inter­est in eco­nomic devel­op­ment and China. The pair, who met in a Chi­nese lan­guage pro­gram at Beijing’s Tsinghua Uni­ver­sity in 2006, cre­ated a micro­fi­nance pro­gram to help pro­vide assis­tance to some of China’s esti­mated 228 mil­lion peo­ple who have no access to basic finan­cial ser­vices.

Wil­son and McCol­gan cre­ated a Web site that they’ve coined “Face­book for Farm­ers” – it fea­tures many of the core char­ac­ter­is­tics of Web 2.0: social net­work­ing, blog­ging and inter­ac­tive media.

Func­tion­ing sim­i­larly to the one of the more estab­lished micro­fi­nance sites, Kiva.org, Wokai’s online sys­tem of peer-to-peer loans allows poten­tial lenders to scan the pro­files of pre-screened rural Chi­nese bor­row­ers and decide for them­selves who they want to loan money to.

The loans are small – the aver­age loans is around $300 – and are mostly used by farm­ers to invest in sim­ple busi­ness improve­ments such as adding addi­tional live­stock or buy­ing new prod­ucts for dry goods stores.

To attract loans and help develop the orga­ni­za­tion, Wokai has enlisted an army of young vol­un­teers both in the United States and China. They have assisted in every­thing from web­site devel­op­ment to work­ing directly with field part­ners in China to screen poten­tial bor­row­ers. Mean­while, mem­ber chap­ters in San Fran­cisco, Seat­tle and New York help drive aware­ness and dona­tions through local­ized fund rais­ing events.

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