Well I'm staying home with the sniffles today so I thought it would be a good opportunity to finally set up my account on Kiva this morning. I first read about Kiva on Andrew Leonard's How the World Works blog at Salon (articles here and here), which by the way is a a great way to keep up with all things economic unless you are an operative for the RNC. Anyway, apparently Bill Clinton has been stumping for Kiva as well.
So for those of you who don't know what Kiva is, it's a non-profit company that allows people like me to loan money to the working poor around the world, a practice generally referred to as microcredit. The loans requested are generally pretty small, from a few hundred to a couple thousand. Traditionally most of these people have been ignored by the traditional finance system because they lack collateral, a credit history, or are generally considered not profitable. Microcredit has received a fair amount of press in the past couple of years, as Bangladeshi entrepreneur Mohammed Yunus and the Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for their work in microcredit and economic development. Hopefully some day the worldwide microcredit infrastructure will be built up enough so that organizations like Kiva are no longer needed, but until then I figured I would give a hand.
So for those of you wondering where all of the money for the Christmas gifts you didn't get went, this is where it is going. I did a little math and figured if I threw in some money for myself that might come out somewhere around $500 so the plan is to lend $100 to five different people. One of the hardest things to do is to decide whom to make a loan to. Each entrepreneur has his or her (or their) own story posted on Kiva, and it's hard not to want to give all of them a helping hand. Since I had to pick some methodology I guess I am going for a mix of geographic distribution. I made my first loan this morning to a guy named Oleg, a taxi driver from Ukraine. An unexpected choice, but Oleg appeared to be having problems attracting loans - my guess it's because he looks like a pretty jovial white guy (seriously Oleg, you need to work on your 'downtrodden' look). Anyway Kiva lets you attach a banner for your guys such as the one below, which I think should update as they move towards their loan goal. I'm going to wait a couple days to make sure everything goes swimmingly, and then I'll let you know about the other loans.
So for those of you who don't know what Kiva is, it's a non-profit company that allows people like me to loan money to the working poor around the world, a practice generally referred to as microcredit. The loans requested are generally pretty small, from a few hundred to a couple thousand. Traditionally most of these people have been ignored by the traditional finance system because they lack collateral, a credit history, or are generally considered not profitable. Microcredit has received a fair amount of press in the past couple of years, as Bangladeshi entrepreneur Mohammed Yunus and the Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for their work in microcredit and economic development. Hopefully some day the worldwide microcredit infrastructure will be built up enough so that organizations like Kiva are no longer needed, but until then I figured I would give a hand.
So for those of you wondering where all of the money for the Christmas gifts you didn't get went, this is where it is going. I did a little math and figured if I threw in some money for myself that might come out somewhere around $500 so the plan is to lend $100 to five different people. One of the hardest things to do is to decide whom to make a loan to. Each entrepreneur has his or her (or their) own story posted on Kiva, and it's hard not to want to give all of them a helping hand. Since I had to pick some methodology I guess I am going for a mix of geographic distribution. I made my first loan this morning to a guy named Oleg, a taxi driver from Ukraine. An unexpected choice, but Oleg appeared to be having problems attracting loans - my guess it's because he looks like a pretty jovial white guy (seriously Oleg, you need to work on your 'downtrodden' look). Anyway Kiva lets you attach a banner for your guys such as the one below, which I think should update as they move towards their loan goal. I'm going to wait a couple days to make sure everything goes swimmingly, and then I'll let you know about the other loans.
1 comment:
I guess I started a trend, Oleg has already received another $50 in the time it took me to post this! Clearly this is entirely due to my efforts.
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