After spending a couple hours reading all the amazing stories on Kiva, I chose to loan to the Señor De Luren Group.  Yolanda is the treasurer for the group this year.  She has three children who are 26, 18 and 16 years of age.

Yolanda owns a small stationary store in Ayacucho, Peru.  She started it with just a few items and has since expanded her inventory to include a photocopier and other services.  The loan will be used to buy school supplies from wholesale distributors; this is the next step in her business expansion.  Her dream is to have a large stationary/bookstore and to be able to fill large orders for all her local schools.

I can’t wait to hear about Yolanda’s growing business!  If you haven’t done so already, sign up for a Kiva account.  It’s a wonderful way to help those who are less fortunate around the world.

For my birthday this year, my friend André Malan gave me a $25 gift certificate for Kiva. What is Kiva? you might ask yourself.

Kiva’s mission is to connect people, through lending, for the sake of alleviating poverty.  Kiva empowers individuals to lend to an entrepreneur across the globe.  By combining microfinance with the internet, Kiva is creating a global community of people connected through lending.

The basic idea is revolved around the fact that people are generous by nature and are willing to help others.  This may sound really cheesy, but as of today there are 473,412 Kiva lenders in 201 countries.  Demonstrating that people, if given the opportunity, are willing to help a complete stranger.  Here are a few more interesting statistics (as of Aug. 15, 2010):

My next blog post will be about the loan I chose to help fund with the gift certificate.