Kiva - Helping people on the cheap & teaching your kids: investment and philanthropy

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, we drove the family from Minnesota to Missouri to visit both sets of (grand)parents.  At Thanksgiving dinner, a friend of the family pointed me toward a new(ish) Microfinance gateway designed to allow us -- relatively wealthy Westerners to participate in awarding microloans to small-time entrepreneurs in the developing world.  I kind of knew about microfinance and how it worked but didn't know the details.  It turns out that Kiva is a pretty enchanting package.  (Perhaps not as enchanting as if I were earning a bit of interest, but hey, I have other investment instruments for that -- this is different: altruism with panache.)

So here I am looking at it and it strikes me -- I'm going to do this and see how it works.  So I decided to loan $100.  It's an amount I can loan without needing to budget.  It's not the end of the world if I never see repayment (though the stats on that are really good).  I can loan as little as $25 to a recipient so I chose four:  a Mexican, a Honduran, a Kenyan and a Ugandan.  And you know something that I wasn't expecting, that was cool?  I got to watch over a couple of hours as their loans filled up.  And I felt like part of a semi-anonymous community.  And yesterday I got an email saying that one of the loans was disbursed -- that feedback was neat.  I'll enjoy monitoring the progress of these loans.

 Something else that I found very positive about Kiva is that they sell gift certificates.  My kids are five (in a week) and twelve.  I'm buying each of them a $25 gift certificate and then helping them select a recipient.  I'll buy them each $25 less plastic junk that they'll forget in two weeks time and give them a lesson that I think will also be fun.  I don't know what each of them will take from the experience, but it couldn't be bad.  They'll sift through applicants and see their situations and their pictures and have to decide with _one_ of those in need should get it.  It's a pretty mature situation and will be interesting to see how they each handle it.  There's so much talk these days about teaching our kids generosity in our highly commercial culture and I don't know any more than the rest of you how for to take that or what really works, but I'm sure this won't hurt anything and it's not as extreme as volunteering at a soup kitchen (to which my son has declared his opposition :-).

Anyway, swing on over to Kiva and maybe you'll be able to find $25 that you can spare to bring a little ease and comfort to someone in a worse situation than your own.  Good luck.