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):
| Value of all loans made through Kiva: | $153,424,525 |
| Entrepreneurs that have received a loan: | 396,456 |
| Loans that have been funded through Kiva: | 211,281 |
| Loans which have been made to women: | 82.12% |
| Repayment rate: | 98.84% |
My next blog post will be about the loan I chose to help fund with the gift certificate.