Jessica Beltman is an anthropology graduate student at San Francisco State University. Her undergraduate degree was in Visual Communications at the University of South Carolina with an emphasis on photojournalism. For her master’s thesis, she planned and implemented an applied research project among the Maasai people of Tanzania to understand problems facing Maasai women and facilitate communication between different Maasai groups across Sub-Saharan Africa. While there, she gained a better understanding of the effects of poverty on the individual family and would like to continue to contribute to poverty alleviation. Therefore, she is very excited to begin working at Kiva. In her free time, Jessica enjoys traveling, learning about different cultures, reading, and photography.