November 18, 2025
By Caiden Kippnick, BA Accounting
Mahdi Hassnawi, BS Finance
Kohen Lepeak, BS Finance
Damien Gjekaj, BS Food Industry Management
Niko Stamadianos, BA Finance
At Spartan Global Development Fund, our goals are to help entrepreneurs in developing communities with the power of microloans. This power helps support their families and grow their businesses. Here we have three examples of impactful loans that we have contributed to this semester, and just a few of the many impacts they have had.
Recently, we gave $200 to the Luchando Por Un Sueno Group in Nicaragua. They plan on using the funds to buy more dresses, shirts, pants, blouses, children’s outfits, and sandals to sell in their business. This loan would allow them to expand their business and offer more clothing options to their clients. With the extra income generated from the loan, the group plans on building a house. Spartan Global is proud to lend to Luchando Por Un Sueno, as it allows the group to continue fighting towards their dreams.
Since last year, Spartan Global has had an increased presence on the African Continent. Last month, we lent $450 to a coffee farmer in Uganda named Katonda. He plans to use the funds to help mulch and fertilize his coffee plantation in order to improve his yields. With the income Katonda earns from these yields, he hopes to be able to start plastering his house. This is just one example of many loans that have an impact beyond their intended purpose, which helps us further encourage sustainable economic development for farmers like Katonda and thousands of others.
SGDF continues to pursue our effort to lend to developing countries around the world. Some of our efforts to achieve this goal this past quarter of the year have been lending to countries in South America. Take our recent loan for example, to Juan, an indigenous farmer based in Cauca, Colombia. Our loan of $325 helped finish off the rest of Juan's request to Kiva to be able to afford an automatic hole-digging agricultural excavator. This purchase and our efforts will help Juan improve efficiency in land preparation, speed up planting tasks, and strengthen the productivity of his coffee and banana crops, considering he uses manual tools on a 2.5-acre farm that has over 4000 coffee plants and 230 banana trees. He has a big influence in his community and provides crops for many. Along with running his own plantation, he also provides and takes cares of his elderly parents.
Faber is a farmer from Suaza, Huila. He has spent 46 years growing his two-hectare plot, where more than 10,000 coffee plants grow next to a wide variety of fruit trees. He is committed to sustainable agriculture by using organic waste to improve the soil and support local biodiversity. This displays the kind of long-term community impact Spartan Global Development Fund aims to support through microloans with Kiva. He lives on the land with his two sons and is helped by his daughters when needed. Faber represents resilience and dedication in what he does. With a loan of 2,368,424 Colombian Pesos, he was able to purchase organic fertilizer to strengthen his harvest, improve the quality of his crops, and ensure the continued sustainability of his farm demonstrating how small loans can create important, lasting change.
These loans, along with many others, are just a small percentage of the work that Spartan Global is up to as of recently to achieve our mission of providing opportunities for everyone in the world, making a difference, and curating an impact.