Kiva - Loans that Change Lives

For my birthday last year, my friend Narelle gave me a gift certification to Kiva. Now, I'd never heard of Kiva until then but it was one of the best birthday presents I've ever gotten.

Kiva is a non-profit that allows you to lend as little as US$25 to a specific low-income entrepreneur across the globe. It is a person-to-person micro-lending site that connects you to real people who need loans to start or build a business in their local community. Sometimes they are individuals but can be families or co-operatives. They work in a wide range of businesses, from hair dressing to sewing to light manufacturing to retail, restaurants and farming.

The money I lend through Kiva gets aggregated with loans from other lenders and goes to local microfinance institutions Kiva works with. These local institutions are there on the ground and have identified real entrepreneurs from impoverished communities. As these local business grow, it not only helps the family of the business owner, but the rest of their community as well.

You choose who to lend to - whether a baker in Afghanistan, a goat herder in Uganda, a farmer in Peru, a restaurateur in Cambodia or a tailor in Iraq - and as they repay their loan, you get your money back. You can then make another loan or take your money out of Kiva.

So far, I've made 20 loans with 7 paid back in full and 13 loans still active. I get regular updates on how my loans are going and can see, down to the transaciton, just how the repayments are going for each loan on the Kiva website.

Where have I invested?

• Dominican Republic
• Ghana
• Guatemala
• Lebanon
• Nigeria
• Pakistan
• Phillippnes
• Peru
• Uganda
• Tajikistan
• Tanzania
• Togo

I've had so much fun that I've started giving Kiva gift certificates to my family instead of birthday presents so they can join in the fun.

Kiva. It's a powerful and sustainable way to empower someone right now to lift themselves out of poverty.