Party like a Philanthropist!!

Kiva.org helps your Conscience recover.

As a young single American, I find it tremendously easy to get swept up in the immediate luxury and hedonism which a steady paycheck affords me. Watching movies at my comfortable home, venturing out to enjoy a nice meal with some friends, or hitting the club for a night of excessive drinking and decadence, I am the center of my universe and nothing else matters.

Every now and then, though, I stumble upon an NPR show or some BBC news brief that brings to light the realization that there is a large planet out there full of people who are, for the most part, much less fortunate. It is websites like Kiva.org that save me from my inadvertent selfishness and allow me to make a real change in someone else’s life without detracting from my own rockstar lifestyle.

Let’s face it—we are all shamelessly attached to our rockstar lifestyles.

Kiva, whose name is derived from the Swahili word for “agreement,” describes its mission as “to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.” Essentially, they allow you to be a “mini-Bill Gates” by providing a loan of as little as $25 to an entrepreneur in a developing or otherwise impoverished community. If you live in New York City or some similar metropolis, this equates to one round of drinks for your already drunk friends. They won’t miss it.

Over the span of your loan (which lasts usually six months to a year), you can opt to receive email updates and track repayments to mark the progress of your new friend. Once you are paid back—and they boast a remarkable 99.72% repayment rate—you are offered the option to re-invest in another entrepreneur, donate to Kiva.org, or withdraw your funds and go purchase those shiny white pumps you saw the other day.

Sound too easy? Too good to be true? It’s not. The website is continually striving to make the flow of money as transparent as possible so you don’t have to worry that some money-grubbing third-world Gargamel is using your donation to re-upholster his velvet loveseat or polish his third Mercedes. You can browse through hundreds of diverse profiles of aspiring businesspeople and choose the one that you feel most deserving of your valuable dollars. (is that an oxymoron yet?)

As opposed to traditional charities, your loan through Kiva is an endorsement of accountability. It provides a possible solution to a problem rather than simply alleviating some of the symptoms. As they say, “Teach a man to fish, and you can drink like one later that night.” ‘Sounds like a plan.

So I chose a small group of investors in Kenya who are attempting to raise money for cereal. I like cereal. It’s a great way to start your day, so I empathized immediately with these peoples’ cause. The whole ordeal took about ten minutes at most: I logged onto the site, clicked the “lend” button, picked a suitably impoverished yet hopeful-looking entrepreneur, and within seconds had transferred my modest donation of fifty buckaroonies across the universe. My wallet didn’t even twitch and my mouse clicking finger barely broke a sweat. It all happened so quickly that I almost felt cheated of that warmy feeling you are supposed to get when you help people out.

This website is truly a revolution in philanthropy. I printed out a bunch of the fact sheets from the site to read over during a zesty pad thai lunch break and I literally was tearing up while munching down my side salad with ginger dressing. Since it’s injunction in 2005, Kiva has raised over thirty million dollars in loans. That’s three years, people! Reading the timeline of the company’s growth and progress is like doing cartwheels through a field of jelly beans; you can’t help but be moved by how quickly so many people are flocking to the site and giving so selflessly.

Kiva.org has given us all a chance to be better people by providing legitimate opportunities for people to raise themselves out of the grit and muck of poverty. It’s easy, it’s transparent, and it’s endorsed by Bill Clinton and Oprah Winfrey.

So what are you waiting for?


A Fistful Of Dollars: The Story of a Kiva.org Loan from Kieran Ball on Vimeo.