P2P Microfinance

Inspiration

Last semester in our Entrepreneurship and Innovation class, we participated in an activity called the GumBall challenge. The GumBall challenge was a micro-financing activity where teams of 4 students were provided $27 and 27 gumballs and told to make as much money as they could in a week. Micro-financing was originally formulated by Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank. The micro-financing scheme helps people in these third world countries build small businesses in the scope of their village by providing them with the capital to jump start their businesses. We wanted this chance to be available to more people so we came up with the idea of crowdsourcing the money required for microfinancing.

What it does

It provides a platform for people in first world countries a way to microfinance people who live in poorer nations such as India and Africa.

How we built it

We built two apps using Android Studio, and we used Firebase for data storage and user authentication.

Challenges we ran into

Authentication was an extremely difficult task to get around. Being able to create a account system for a lender who would want to use their google account and a borrower who would use their phone number was extremely challenging.