Kristof on how to turn lunch money into hope

Kristof, who never gives up, has an article on how micro-finance has become personal. He visits his business partners in Afghanistan...

The New York Times
March 27, 2007
You, Too, Can Be a Banker to the Poor
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

...From my laptop in New York, I lent $25 each to the owner of a TV repair shop in Afghanistan, a baker in Afghanistan, and a single mother running a clothing shop in the Dominican Republic. I did this through www.kiva.org, a Web site that provides information about entrepreneurs in poor countries — their photos, loan proposals and credit history — and allows people to make direct loans to them...

... Mr. Abdul Satar said he didn’t know what the Internet was, and he had certainly never been online. But Kiva works with a local lender affiliated with Mercy Corps, and that group finds borrowers and vets them.

The local group, Ariana Financial Services, has only Afghan employees and is run by Storai Sadat, a dynamic young woman who was in her second year of medical school when the Taliban came to power and ended education for women...

...Web sites like Kiva are useful partly because they connect the donor directly to the beneficiary, without going through a bureaucratic and expensive layer of aid groups in between....

...A young American couple, Matthew and Jessica Flannery, founded Kiva after they worked in Africa and realized that a major impediment to economic development was the unavailability of credit at any reasonable cost....

Yes, it's a bit gimmicky, it would presumably be more efficient to give the money to CARE.ORG and let them donate to a microfinance organization. Still, the human angle might help draw in some extra funds. Going forward, the interesting possibility is going the next step, and becoming an active business partner. So make the loan, but also become involved in the enterprise. A bit like being an armchair peace corp person.

I'll give it a try.