Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Made my Kiva micro-loan for the month of September

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

This one was for a group of five (one man, four women) in Kabul, Afghanistan for their individual business needs, including: purchasing beading materials, fruit cart business, general store, bakery business, and selling of books, pens, and other things. It is an 11-month micro-loan for a total of $1,075, of which I lent $25. The micro-loan was already disbursed to the micro-entrepreneur on July 27, 2009 by the local partner. Kiva is raising funds to essentially buy that loan from the local partner.

I now have only one micro-loan that is delinquent. It is actually just due to the field partner experiencing difficulty with transferring the money back to Kiva due to some new local government requirement. The other loan which was tagged as being delinquent has now been fully repaid.

I have made a total of 21 micro-loans to date, since December 2009.

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