kiva.org

In computers & internet, money, world events on 11 July 2009 tagged borrowing, charity, kiva, lending, loans, micro financing, money, ngo with no comments

this week i joined kiiva.org. i’d been mean­ing to do it for a while, but while i was avoid­ing the heat (and avoid­ing the streets of danang) i decided to finally get on board and put some money into the site.

basic­ally, kiva.org is a char­ity based on micro-financed loans. lenders (me) can loan money to an indi­vidual or group who have been approved by kiva or an affil­i­ate char­ity. the bor­rower receives the money and is expec­ted to use it to develop their busi­ness. they’re also expec­ted to pay the money back. this means that i get my money returned to me, which i can either loan out again or with­draw com­pletely from my kiva account.

here’s a link to my lender’s page: http://www.kiva.org/lender/davidsmeaton

it’s a great idea and a great organ­isa­tion … they’ve already made impres­sions amongst the global ngo com­munity and i think that repay­able loans is a much more effect­ive method of giv­ing char­ity (as opposed to thrown money into a bot­tom­less pit).

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