I just made my 250th loan with Kiva.

Last month, Hilary Clinton wrote a piece in the Guardian which had the following paragraph near the beginning: Consider the world's typical small farmer. She lives in a rural village, rises before dawn, and walks miles to collect water. If drought, blight, or pests don't destroy her crops, she may raise enough to feed her family - and may even have ( Read more... )

Available in the week before Christmas - 25 dollar Kiva gift certificates to the first eight people who contact me.



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I just made my 100th loan to Kiva entrepreneurs. I started loaning in March 2006 when I had a bonus from work and nothing I wanted to buy at the time. Each month I would do four loans, until the bonus was used up, which lasted for about eight or nine months ( Read more... )

Once a month I check the Kiva website, and add to my selection of loans. Originally when I started I added 100 dollars to my account each month, but I no longer need to do that since my first loans are all repaid so I have enough capital in my account to fund each new month. One of the reasons this is such a great use of money - it gets recycled ( Read more... )

I checked out Kiva this morning since I had some email updates, and found this notice on the front page:

Congratulations Kiva Lenders ( Read more... )

I was just scanning some of my bookmarks this morning and in the Kiva Chronicles I found this:

Kiva continues to face chronic shortages in businesses to fund as we try to accomodate the growing lender interest while managing risk on our platform. We've limited user transactions to $25 per user for the rest of the month to deal with the shortage. ( Read more... )

It looks like my interview will be on Click this weekend, since they have the Social lending gains net interest article up on the web site with a quote from me ( Read more... )

I've not been online much recently since with the fine weather I've been down the allotment a lot, but I had an interesting day revolving around the media today. A week or two ago I was contacted by Kiva and asked if I was willing to do an interview for the BBC programme Click since they were doing a piece about lending online. Rather surprisingly ( Read more... )

I've been interested in the idea of microcredit for several years, since reading the book The Price of a Dream The story of the Grameen Bank by David Bornstein. You may recognise the name of the bank, since it was in the news recently as a joint Nobel peace prize winner. The idea of microcredit is that small loans are made to people who have no ( Read more... )