The following are comments on the previous post (and so are a bit hidden on this main page). I decided to promote them to their own thread since the concept of www.Kiva.org may inspire some interesting conversation here.
My 2 cents -- Kiva has an intriguiging idea to bring microlending to the masses and is definately worth considering. I have been using it for a while and am impressed. Ken D. feels the same way. Check it out.
(the links on the comments below probably won't copy well. See the comments section on the previous post for more info)
Best, Ernie
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www.kiva.org
Submitted by eparizeau on January 16, 2008 - 8:56pm.
Great summary! Got me chuckling.
An idea for your group as you consider worthy charities...
You may already be aware of "microlending", but just in case you have not run into this site check out:
www.kiva.org
I like their idea as it falls into the "teach a man to fish" category of charities, rather than "give him a fish" category. In my mind, a much more powerful model to help developing countires.
You could donate your $1000 to perpetual use through lending (and hopefully relending) to third world entrepreneurs.
Ernie Parizeau
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Microlending with Kiva
Submitted by Ken Danieli on January 17, 2008 - 1:17am.
We've been lending through Kiva since last spring and it's been one of the most rewarding charities we've ever participated in. We've made small loans to 10 very small businesses around the world, and we specifically choose the entrepreneurs we lend to right on the Kiva site. Kiva emails us the status as the loan payments come in each month. Most of the loans have already been nearly fully paid back. We just re-loaned funds that were fully repaid by a woman in Nigeria to a new group of small businesswomen in Pakistan. In a few weeks, several more loans will be fully repaid and we'll then look for more businesses to invest in. I never saw a charity before that lets you use the same "donation" over and over again - or even cash it in.
Kiva even keeps a portfolio page for us:
Our Kiva Portfolio: 10 very small businesses around the world
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Microlending with Kiva
Many of you probably heard that the concept of Microlending, through its pioneers in Bangladesh, won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2006.
Nobel Prize for Economics 2006
Art's adviser and econ professor at SUNY/WCC, Farhad Ameen, is from Bangladesh and has published papers on why microlending works so well for women in particular.
Kiva really brings the concept to life in an engaging way. The positively reinforcing feedback loop of actually seeing the loan recipients in developing nations worldwide, as well as seeing the other lenders in developed economies, also from around the world, and the ability to see the loan repayments coming in every month as a signal of their success keeps this a compelling and very well-executed effort. It gives the site and the idea "stickiness."
For example, our most recent small loan to a group of women conducting various businesses in Pakistan, was a reloan of the same funds we had previously loaned to a woman in Nigeria. In Pakistan, the same women also received microloan funds from more than 50 lenders all over the developed world, including Italy, France, UK, Germany, Canada, Switzerland, and Poland. We can see this on the page for this group of businesswomen: Newest loan in Pakistan
(Separately, eBay, whose founder is committed to microlending, has launched MicroPlace. We've loaned money there as well, but I find that it's not nearly as compelling as Kiva is. At MicroPlace, your funds are pooled into a financial instrument and you don't get to select the recipients, nor do you get to see how they're doing like you can so easily at Kiva. It's a fundamental disconnect with the power of what eBay is supposed to do best - connect distant people who economically need each other to "safely" conduct transactions. The lawyers and bankers at eBay have evidently gotten to this and have thus diluted its emotional impact and rendered it rather dry and "unsticky" thus far.)