Kiva.org: A Great Place to Help Save the World
Gary Roberts, a professor in Kennesaw State University’s Management and Entrepreneurship program, turned me on to what is now my favorite site on the Internet. It’s Kiva.org. Once you go there it will be hard not to give away your money. Actually you are not giving it away, you’re just lending it out with the risk you might not get it back. But there’s the much greater chance that the money will help people work their way out of extreme poverty. Here is what Kiva.org says at its About page:
We let you loan to the working poor
Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can “sponsor a business” and help the world’s working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you’ve sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.
It is also one of the best constructed sites I have seen. It tells you all about the people who are seeking loans and then shows you all the other folks who have pitched in to help out. You then get your own portfolio and then when you think you are being generous you see most of the other folks are in fact more generous than you are. The minimum is $25 and I have decided to stagger my giving, so that as my first loans are paid back my money can get rotated on to someone else and eventually I should have fairly substantial portfolio. One group calling itself Emily’s Family has at least 400 loans in its portfolio.
The estimated default rate is about 6 percent, which means that 94 percent of the loans are repaid within 6 to 18 months. When a loan is repaid, you can either pull out your money or reinvest it into another person. I would say it is one of the smartest ideas on the web and shows the Web’s potential for really doing good. Here is a great video by The New York Times’ Nicholas D. Kristof explaining the project in more depth.
