Made my Kiva micro-loan for the month of August

I made a new micro-loan through Kiva for the month of August. My intention is to make a new micro-loan every month, if possible, from repayments for past micro-loans. Repayments in July were more than enough to fund this latest micro-loan (and one for September as well.)

This one was for a young married man, with children, in Palestine who cleans carpets. It is a 20-month micro-loan for a total of $1,500, of which I lent $25. The money is to be used to buy cleaning supplies.  The micro-loan was already disbursed to the micro-entrepreneur on July 16, 2009 by the local partner. Kiva is raising funds to essentially buy that loan from the local partner.

Two of my micro-loans are delinquent. One is actually just due to the field partner experiencing difficulty with transferring the money back to Kiva due to some new local government requirement. I suspect that the other is also experiencing some local problem and is already 75% repaid. Both are in central Africa.

Here is my Kiva public lender page: http://www.kiva.org/lender/JackKrupansky

Note: This is all real and good, but these micro-loans do not net any interest to us micro-lenders. Kiva's fine print:

Lending to the working poor through Kiva involves risk of principal loss.
Kiva does not guarantee repayment nor do we offer a financial return on your loan.

Still, at least we know our money is really helping somebody better their lives in a visible way rather than put the money in a bank account or money market fund where who knows what it helps to pay for or what good it does and for only a few pennies of profit in our pockets.

-- Jack Krupansky