Yesterday I received an e-mail from the organization Kiva. This is an organization I wrote about a couple of months ago that simply amazes me. Put as simply as I can, it's a site that aggregates small amounts of money and facilitates making micro loans (and collecting repayments) for people all over the world. If you've not looked at this site, do it now. Truly amazing.
Anyway, the e-mail that I received was showing me the repayments that had been made on the 3 loans in which I'm participating. I contributed just $25 to each of 3 different people and, together with many others, we were able to fund loans that could be the difference between success and failure for people trying to build tiny businesses in 3rd world nations. The repayments come back to me as credits in my account. Today, I applied those credits, and added a little more to fund a 4th loan. This one was for a woman in an Asian country called Tajikistan. She is applying for a loan of $875 to buy more cattle that she raises for her business. How cool is it that I'm actually helping individual people around the world to achieve a greater degree of self-sufficiency and perhaps an end to their poverty?
I don't know who had the idea for Kiva, but it's a brilliant one for allowing so many people to participate at small amounts of money, and track both the impact of the loans as well as the repayments. Anyone who is pessimistic about the state of the world should spend more time looking at sites like these. Very life affirming.
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