Thursday, December 25, 2008

Initial Kiva loans

I forgot to mention that my primary criteria for my initial Kiva loans was to make the final contribution of $25 or $50 so that the full amount of each micro-loan would be funded so that I would be sure that the loan would proceed immediately. In reality, that is not usually necessary since many of the micro-loans have already been disbursed by the time they are posted on the Kiva.org Web site. Still, it is nice to see the process completed promptly and the loan cleared through the system. I did not want my money to be sitting around idle.

Once I start getting repayments, I will no longer use this as my top requirement. Hopefully I can get to the stage where every month I get enough repayments to contribute to a new micro-loan regardless of how much of the loan has been funded.

Funding micro-loans in Kiva is a great response to all of the global anger about all of these big banks that require all of these bailouts and are not lending to people who can really use the money anyway. If you want a new world order that is not controlled by big banks, Kiva is a great way to go. It is an alternative to begging or forcing big banks to give "handouts" to "poor people."

-- Jack Krupansky

1 Comments:

At 10:07 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Great to hear that you are a Kiva fan! If you (or your friends / family) are interested in getting more involved with Kiva, we have two core volunteer programs:

• Kiva Fellows Program: Individuals spend 10 weeks to one year with a microfinance institution in a developing country, chronicling the lives of the working poor and assisting the microfinance institutions to maximize their relationship with Kiva. (www.kiva.org/fellows)

• Kiva Translation Program: Volunteering from their own homes, individuals take entrepreneurs’ loan profiles written in the local language and translate to English, which are then posted for lending on Kiva.org. Kiva Translators help bring the entrepreneurs' stories to life for potential lenders. (www.kiva.org/volunteer)

** Languages needed include: Bahasa Indonesia, French, Mongolian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Vietnamese.

 

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