pat loughery

It’s now a few days before Christmas, and if you’ve been living under a rock for a while, you’re now in panic mode trying to finish up your gift purchasing and shipping.

Of course, when I say “You” I mean “I” or “me”.

I’ve got a few gifts to finish up with, and I’m taking a slightly different approach this year.

In our family gift drawing (the adults draw names and we have one person to buy a gift for), I got my brother’s name. Seems I always get my brother’s name, so I suspect that the whole thing is fixed, but this is good. My brother’s pretty easy to buy for – he likes motorcycles and hot sauce. We sort of have an ongoing theme between us this way. But sifting through the various ways to find something stamped Harley-Davidson or something spicy felt empty; I wanted to do something a bit more deep.

Last year, my wife drew my brother’s name (thus giving us the perception that it’s not a fix), and she had all the adults write a letter to him telling him what he means to us. She put a scrapbook together for him with all of these kind words. It was a monumental effort and wonderful gift.

I have no such skill.

But I did have an idea.

I’m going give my brother the opportunity to start a bicycle repair shop, or buy a taxi, or breed cows in a developing country.

Let me introduce to you the micro-lending website, Kiva. Kiva is a website and social network that matches up people who want to lend money to entrepreneurs trying to escape poverty in the developing world, and those entrepreneurs.

Say for example that you live in Honduras and you have a bicycle repair shop as your primary income, but you need a business loan to help you buy tools and parts.

Or say that your business is selling baleadas (a Honduran tortilla filled with mashed, friend beans ajd maybe some other ingredients). You need a bit of money to help buying ingredients.

Or, in one specific case, four of you (two of the above as well as a grocery store owner and a shoe and clothing salesman) get together as an entrepreneurial group which receives the funds together and keeps each other accountable.

You work with a local agency which vets you and places you into the Kiva system.

You as a group ask for a small amount of money (in this case $950USD). Your group receives the loan and puts it to work; then you make repayments according to schedule.

Or, as another example, say you area a high school mathematics teacher in Tajikistan. You are married with six children. To make ends meet you have a second job as a taxi driver, but your current car doesn’t work well on mountain roads, so you want to upgrade your vehicle.

Then, switching hats, you are now the lender. You can sort through the businesses requesting loans, filtering by geographic region or market sector or loan risk. Find an opportunity that catches your attention, and with a loan as small as $25, you join the pool of people who are helping that business.

That business takes the loan and funds their request, and then has a repayment plan for the loan. You as the lender are repaid, at which point you can take the money back out as cash, or you can choose to fund a different venture.

This week, says Kiva, 4,364 entrepreneurs were funded; 21,415 lenders made a loan, and $1.6 million dollars was lent out.

To help people unfamiliar with Kiva to get started, Kiva allows you to purchase gift certificates. These can be printed and mailed, or emailed to the recipient. With a gift certificate, the recipient chooses how to spend the money: by helping to start a bicycle repair shop, or buying a taxi in Tajikistan, or breeding cows in Cambodia, or thousands of other ideas that help to lift people out of poverty.

Put your Christmas gift to work helping people lift themselves out of poverty. I suspect you’ll like it more than another Harley Davidson shirt, and almost as much as discovering a new hot sauce 🙂

	Make a loan Change a life
Name: Sarah Adjo G Location: Togo	Loan Needed: $1,175 15 % funded