Repugies, it describes what happened to them, but it is not who they are.

You know, one of the things that I hear over and over again is, you know, refugees who say,

I want to be seen not as a refugee, but as an entrepreneur.

I want to be seen not as a refugee, but as a small business owner.

The Edict of Nance was signed in 1598 to officially tolerate Protestants in France.

So when it was revered by Louis XIV in 1685, the position of French Protestants, among whom was a Calvinist group known as the Huguenots, became untenable.

In reaction to that, a 21-year-old stone Mason by the name of Pierre Le Grange left his hometown in Cabrier, Provance,

and together with his cousin Louis Cobain, trekked over the Alps to Switzerland, then northward up the Rhine Valley to Frankfurt, and from there to Rotterdam.

You may have heard of these Huguenots in your own countries, numbering about half a million in total, they spread around the world, to the Netherlands, to Switzerland, to Scandinavia, the UK and Ireland.

But the two cousins from our story had a different destination in mind.

In Rotterdam on the 20th of March 1688, they boarded the China, a 160-foot wooden ship that five months later docked in Table Bay Cape Town, my hometown.

And one new really should visit. I can trace my family line directly back to that Pierre Le Grange, the young refugee who fled religious persecution 340 years ago.

When Pierre and Louis and the other Huguenots boarded the ships for South Africa, they were given funds to get themselves established, and opportunities to work and join the community.

14 years after landing, Pierre was a property owner, a dream that is sadly beyond most modern day refugees. This is how to lend money to refugees with Brendan Le Grange.

Live Plav is welcome to heart to lend money to strangers. You are the investment director for refugees and displaced people at Kiva.

It is an organisation that I first became aware of in about 2007 during a very early MBA project.

And an organisation that I took some inspiration from actually in a social entrepreneurship project.

I did it later in my course, that won me a trip to San Francisco. So an organisation that's quite close to my heart.

Before we get more into the specifics of what Kiva is doing, you have a quite remarkable background in the lead up to where you are today.

So let's start there.

Thanks so much Brendan. It's wonderful to be here and thanks for those kind words about Kiva.

So I grew up in the Bay Area where I'm coming to from today, Ropen Berkeley, California, and I think played around with a lot of different things through my earlier years on what I might be interested in.

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