Microloan "investing" like Kiva.org

[baldy]

I watch this great presentation on ted http://www.ted.com/talks/jessica_jackle ... _love.html by the founder of Kiva http://www.kiva.org/ and got me interested.

It is a really interesting approach and looks a decent way to invest veganly and help people. Some of the criticism about it is that the agents in each country do not use the donations for the particular client and just use peoples for almost adverts to get funding.

There are a few other similar sites some which return interest (that can then be reinvested or donated).

Does anyone have any experience with these type of sites or recommendations. I was thinking it would make an interesting xmasy present, a donation people could actually get some use out of.

[baldy]

http://longroadhome.wordpress.com/2010/ ... financier/
An interesting article on how Kiva works in practice. The money users invest is really just allocated to a local micro lender.

[Enhydra Lutris]

I'm using Kiva, and find it quite good. It is very easy to get started and therefore probably a good microfinance institute for which to give a gift voucher. The recipient can just log in and search for a type of loan they like (carpenter, bakery, motorcycle transport etc) on a continent of interest. You get the $25 back after some months and then you can re-lend it to some one else, or you can have it paid out to your paypal account. Easy.

Of course, to be a responsible lender you need to use your head a little and read the information provided. Loans from different continents often have different conditions, and you should make sure you know what your money is spent on. It is now more common with backfill loans, that is, the money raised through Kiva is used to cover a loan all ready made to the borrower(s). This is usually stated on the borrower's info page and as with any financial transaction, you should check up on the details. You probably want to read up on the micro-finance institutes that distribute the loans you are interested in (compare interest rates and the risk of you not getting your money back). There are a lot of groups of borrowers on Kiva nowadays, and there are some quirks to this: each group member may use his/her share for a different purpose, the group usually will have to cover members not paying back and the repaying time is often much longer than for smaller individual loans. Also unless you want to make a donation to Kiva in the process of lending your $25, make sure to select that you want to donate $0.00 to Kiva (not this time)! They have recently changed this, so the default is to donate an amount.

As pointed out in the article in the second post, there are no guarantees that the loan will be used as advertised, something which might be worth to keep in mind if you have strong views on how your contribution should be used.

[XkillerX]

sign the fuck up here and lend someone 25 bucks.

if anyone has time please browse through all the loans and post anything vegan, ethical and or environmental. thank you.

come ONNN folks sign the fuck up, it costs nothing and there's still thousands of giveaway accounts!

[Talyn]

Done. Thanks for the reminder mate. It really is a brilliant initiative. Some of the stories are really inspiring.

There aren't really much geared towards veganism or the environment, but there are quite a few fruit/vegetable/grain farmers out there, so I chose a couple of those.