“Our mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.” - Kiva

Kiva.org is a website that allows users to lend money to people all over the world who really need help and are going to use the money lent to them to improve their quality of life.

Several micro-financier organisations train people in third world countries, to become Entrepreneurs. When these people have completed the training course they can choose what kind of business they want to start and apply for a loan from micro-financier organisations like Kiva.

This is where we come in.

We can loan small (or large) ammounts of money to these Entrepreneurs through Kiva which is a website dedicated to distributing these loans. Because the money for each individual may be too much for one person, the donations are usually split up between lots of lenders.

Without organisations like this the other way people in these kind of situations could get a loan is by going to loan sharks, who sometimes charge up to 1000% on the original sum!  The people who the loans go to are really great at paying them back because of how great an opportunity it is, the repayment rate being an impressive 97.35%!

When the recipient of the loan has payed the money back they can get another, slightly larger and so on.

This is a really great way of helping out people in third world countries because we are pretty much always going to get our money back.We’re essentially giving to charity but it doesn’t cost us anything.

Check out the Brotherhood 2.0 video where I found out about Kiva for more. (John makes it sound so much more interesting than I do)

- Bill