lending simplicity

This is a truly cool and amazingly simple way for me to put a bit of my earnings toward alleviating poverty.

Kiva connects lenders to those who are in need of loans for developing sustainable employment ventures through a micro-lending website. You can repeat your lending cycle as often as you wish and you can keep informed of the venture of the entrepreneur to whom you made the loan.

I love the simplicity of this website. I especially like how it fits with my values.

Here are the loans I’ve made:

Sarah Afriyie lives with her family, her husband and two children, in Konongo in the Ashanti Region. She is fifty two years old. Both of her children have completed senior high school and her husband is a cocoa farmer. Sarah is a trader. She trades mainly in plantain and other food items. She buys her produce from the farmers in her community and nearby towns. She treks to Accra to sell to local ‘chop bar’ (restaurant) operators. Sarah has been in business for over six years and is well experienced. When plantain becomes scarce, she resorts to buying and reselling food items like cassava, yam, etc. Sarah wants to buy plantain on larger scale so that she can supply to a greater number of customers and increase her profit margin.
Elizabeth is 28 years old and lives with her partner, father, and two children in her own home. Ever since starting her own family she had been only in the farming of coffee and bananas on the farms of her in-laws, but in the last year she has also started to sell vegetables. For that, every Friday before dawn she travels to the mountain area of her city to buy vegetables such as: lettuce, spinach, carrots, onions, etc., and on Saturday she sells them in her area. This business is very profitable because she is the only person selling these products in her area. Elizabeth is very happy with her business, and even though she has to travel for four hours she doesn’t mind as it is profitable and, thanks to these profits, her children do not suffer from a lack of necessities.

She is very grateful that with her first loan from MFP she was able to use the capital for her vegetable business, for which she committed and fulfilled to her fellow members of the communal bank to be punctual in the payments. The loan that she asks for now will be invested in the purchase of chemical fertilizers and to increase the amount of vegetables that she sells.