I gave a couple of gifts of hardware which you can see on my other blog, but since they were actually on Ingersoll Rand’s dime, I won’t count those as my own gifts. However, I did give a related gift to an entrepreneur in Kenya, who needed a micro-loan for his hardware store (!), where he sells “doorlocks, padlocks, chains, forks, iron boxes and other items.”
I funded the micro-loan through a non-profit organization called Kiva, which I heard about through my cousin. Kiva’s mission is to connect people, through lending, for the sake of relieving poverty. You can search for lending opportunities by gender, type, and region, and when the entrepreneur pays back your loan, you can loan your money to someone else. The minimum loan amount is $25, and the organization has loaned more than $129 million dollars to entrepreneurs in developing countries. Here are some stats from the Kiva website:
Total value of all loans made through Kiva: $129,498,985
Number of Kiva Users who have funded a loan: 442,524
Number of entrepreneurs that have received a loan through Kiva: 330,313
Number of loans that have been funded through Kiva: 181,141
Percentage of Kiva loans which have been made to women entrepreneurs: 82.29%
Current repayment rate (all partners): 98.47%
Average loan size: $395.59
Follow this link to see a short video about the organization:
Kiva Documentary-What Did They Do With My $25 Loan? from Brent E. Huffman on Vimeo..
You can make a difference too! What have you got to lose? $25!