I saw a story on "60 Minutes" over a year ago that really inspired me. It was about a micro-lending organization called Kiva. The founder was on a trip to an African country, Kenya I believe, when she came up with an idea to help the impoverished communities she was seeing. The idea is simple, loan relatively small amounts of money to people trying to take their businesses to the next level and hopefully that will allow them to move further out of poverty. After thinking about making loans for over a year, I finally decided to log in.
My first two loans went to a jewelry maker in Peru and a photographer and tortilla maker in Nicaragua. Both recipients are hoping to make a better life for their children and hopefully these loans will help them with that worthy goal. Once you loan to a person you can see which other lenders were also moved by that particular story and decided to give to them as wall. Kiva has over $12 million in ended loans with only a 1.6% default rate. Sounds like a safe investment to me.
So if you are wanting to give back to the world but aren't sure how to, check out Kiva's Web site and see if it's for you.
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