Kiva Update

About a year ago, we signed up for Kiva, which is a microlender. One of our first loans went to Sith Saron, who lives in Siem Reap Province in Cambodia. She needed a $1,000 for a cow, seeds, and a motorcycle for her farm.

Sith Saron is 37 years old and the mother of 7 children. She sells Khmer traditional cakes such as Num Korm, Num Bot, and Num Krouk to the people in her community and usually earns up to $4 each day. Her husband, meanwhile, works in his rice paddy growing crops as well as several kinds of vegetables. Two of her children are employed at a hotel, but the others are students.
The loan had a 18 month pay back date, and just a couple of weeks ago (about 10 months after taking out the loan), she paid the loan in full.

Kiva is focused on serving the working poor

Kiva's mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.

Kiva is the world's first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world. The people you see on Kiva's site are real individuals in need of funding - not marketing material.

When you browse entrepreneurs' profiles on the site, choose someone to lend to, and then make a loan, you are helping a real person make great strides towards economic independence and improve life for themselves, their family, and their community. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates and track repayments. Then, when you get your loan money back, you can relend to someone else in need.

I really like the last pay it forward part, so the lender can elect to take the money out of Kiva's system or loan it out again, in effect the last business is putting capital back into the system to help the next entrepreneur. Additionally, big props to Paypal which supports Kiva by acting as a transaction processor and waiving fees. What's all this mean? As Tom Barnett says:

everyone who wants to make a difference should just go ahead and get their own foreign policy and stop waiting on change from above.

I added the bold, because the bottom up tools that Kiva, Paypal and the Web give us are really unique, and really powerful to enable through microloans - entrepreuners who we may never meet in countries we may never go to be successful.