Today I start to look at Kiva.org.
It can be found following the URL below.
https://www.kiva.org/
It's simple to use and its mission is “to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty.”
According to Wikipedia:
Since 2005, Kiva has crowd-funded more than a million loans, totaling over $1 billion, with a repayment rate of between 98 and 99 percent. As of November 2013, Kiva was raising about $1 million every three days. The Kiva platform has attracted a community of well over a million lenders from around the world.
That data seems old but it seems that there is no doubt that they have raised a lot of money, helped distribute many loans and most people that lend through kiva get their money back.
The site is dressed down to make it a simple to use as possible.
You start by selecting a category.
Select a story or cause.
That puts it in you cart
You can edit the amount you wish to lend and there is a kiva default donation you need to click on if you wish to alter it.
If you are signed in that's pretty much all there is to it.
Nice and simple... You have done your good deed for the day and you can walk away patting yourself on the back with a warm fuzzy feeling inside.
or, can you...
But you found a nice cause and sent them some money...
What could be wrong with that?
Tomorrow I will look at kiva from a borrower perspective and then it will be seen that the picture is slightly less rosy than the one painted to the Lender.
All pictures in this post are screengrabs taken directly from the kiva.org website for illustrative purposes.