Crowd Sourced Kiva Loan

In my Christmas newsletter (sign up here if you’re not receiving it) I promised a gift on behalf of subscribers to Kiva. 

If you aren’t familiar with www.kiva.org the site links micro-finance lenders with borrowers.  Loans are managed by experienced organisations in the lenders country.  They have pre-approved the lenders and assisted them in their venture with training and guidance. In reality they make the loan and kiva lenders provide the back-up financing. 

Kiva Lenders can view the range of industries and people who are seeking finance and choose a borrower.  Sounds easy but choosing who to fund is hard.  So for our Christmas gift I asked newsletter subscribers to tell me who they would like me to fund on their behalf.  A crowd sourced gift if you like. So what were the results?

Like me, most of you found it hard to choose!  In the end the most common theme was “choose a woman” “choose someone supporting others” and “choose a single mother”.  Surprisingly, given many of the newsletter recipients are expats or global mobility professionals, there were no preferences for a particular region of the world.  So I had to choose.

And I chose the Santa Rosa De Lima - Jauja Group –a group of women from Peru acting as a communal bank and support group for each other’s businesses.  One of them, Elva Luz, 46, is a single mother of three minor, school age children. She currently sells shoes for children and adults. She requested the loan to buy footwear and ankle boots for children and adults to sell at her local street market.   The loan has a six month repayment term and at the end of the six month period we can choose to take our money out or reinvest with another lender.   I will keep you updated with future news from the group and how they go with their repayments.

http://www.kiva.org/lend/377290

If you would like to join kiva you can begin by making a small loan of $25 here http://kiva.org/invitedby/trisha5523

If you are unfamiliar with the concept of micro-financing and how it has changed lives around the world read about Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus and his work in Bangladesh with the Grameen Bank.