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?

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Gifts across cultures

From a cultural perspective gifts can be a challenging issue. I was laughing with some colleagues recently about my embarrassing faux pas, years ago in China, asking the shop assistant to wrap a wedding gift in white paper. Very appropriate in Australia, but very inappropriate in China where the colour white is traditionally associated more with death and mourning. My colleagues had similar stories about their experiences in China of almost giving inappropriate gifts such as a clock and a set of knives.

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