Kiva
They launched last fall but I only came across this today. What an awesome awesome idea!!
Kiva lets you loan as little as $25 to a qualified low income entrepreneur 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.
The story of how Kiva got started and Matt Flannery’s blog are inspiring.
Filed under: inspiration, why are we here? · 7 Comments
I know Matt Flannery from TiVo. He started Kiva while working in my group. Carl Haynes (now Kiva’s “Chief Scientist”) was also in my group and was hired away by Matt to do IT work in Africa. I’m glad to see them being such a huge success. It’s a wonderful idea.
How Sweet. This should give the World Bank a kick in the pants. We should all loan out some cash and see what happens to it.
These are the two businesses I’m sponsoring right now!
http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&action=about&id=433
http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&action=about&id=417
what’s neat is that I can set up a fund and when the loan is paid off I can just lend it to another business.
Oh yeah I worked with Matt before he left to do Kiva fulltime.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/business/global/09kiva.html
I read this article yesterday and David Roodman’s blog post. It’s unfortunate that Kiva wasn’t entirely transparent about how it works. But one thing I noted was that Roodman wrote “I hasten to temper this criticism. What Kiva does behind the scenes is what it should do…” If it actually worked the way it lead people to believe it worked, it wouldn’t actually work very well at all.
I kind of wish Roodman had approached Kiva about it’s misleading copy *before* writing his blog post so we’d have a better idea of how they might have reacted to private criticism first (i.e. if they were to make changes in response to private criticism then I’d feel a little more reassured about their intentions since people with the best intentions can sometimes make mistakes…) If they were to ignore his private criticisms then he’d have cause to write a very critical post…
although, now that I think about it, I’m not entirely sure why it wouldn’t work without microfinance institutions in the middle since Kickstarter.com seems to work…
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/10/DD7P1AG0SL.DTL