Hunched over her computer screen, Kylie Medeiros let out a joyous whoop. The ponytailed 11-year-old from Boston’s rough Roxbury neighborhood was still in her parochial school uniform. Along with two dozen other children in a City Year after-school program, she was deeply engrossed in the challenge of global microfinance.
“Two more beads!” she exclaimed. She and Jaisha Tate, also 11, traded a quick high-five to celebrate their answers to a quiz they were playing at OneHen.org. Players earn virtual beads that the website translates into actual loans for small-business ventures in the developing world. Boston businesswoman Katie Smith Milway modeled the game on her children’s book, One Hen: How One Small Loan Made a Big Difference (Kids Can Press).
“This game is really fun because when you get the correct information, you earn more beads and you can help more people in poor countries,” Kylie said. “It’s a little bit hard—but I know that I am helping somebody who really needs it.”
Jaisha looked up from her own blinking screen and interjected: “You also learn important stuff you don’t know, like economics.”
Such consumer enthusiasm was what Milway, ’82, sought in developing an interactive component for OneHen.org. The book, illustrated by Eugenie Fernandes, describes how a boy in Ghana borrows money to buy a hen, sells its eggs, buys more chickens and grows to become a community leader. Milway’s fictional Kojo was inspired by the life of Kwabena Darko, who has built an empire of poultry and good works in Ghana.
Milway, a consultant in The Bridgespan Group, worked with the Sapient Interactive technology company to create the site, with the goal of demystifying microfinance and explaining sustainable development to 5- to 12-year-olds.
“Microfinance is something children can understand because it happens in increments,” she says. “When kids wash cars or mow lawns to earn spending money, that’s microfinance.” (Growing up in Toronto and Vancouver, she was a lemonade entrepreneur. “Twenty-five cents a cup,” she recalls, laughing.)
The actual loans will be started with about $50,000 in “angel donations,” including a $25,000 grant from the Jenzabar Foundation. The One Hen games have an exchange rate that fluctuates depending on the number of people who are playing, but the site can accumulate up to $100 a day to send overseas. The funds are disbursed through Opportunity International, a Chicago-based nonprofit that uses loan officers to follow up with individual entrepreneurs. (One Hen players can read about a Mozambique fisherman who used loans to buy his own boat and covets a freezer.)
Milway, 47, traces her passion for economic development to her junior year in Italy. Traveling extensively, “I saw poverty in a way I had not seen it before.” In her senior year, she joined a Stanford group that worked with California farm workers and interviewed legendary labor organizer Cesar Chavez. A Rotary International scholarship took her to grad school at the Free University of Brussels, where she focused on international development. From her early 20s on, until the first of her three children was born 13 years ago, she worked in a dozen African countries.
She admits that, as an English major starting out at Stanford, she might not have seen herself writing about poultry economics in the Third World. And then she smiles—why not? “It’s just a different kind of farm.”
ELIZABETH MEHREN is a journalism professor at Boston University.
