Kiva: Lending Action to Alleviate Poverty

Having become an avid follower of Heidi´s delicious recipes and mouthwatering photos in 101 cookbooks I got turned on to their Kiva community lending team. At first I was cautious, trying out their links, checking out the press... they are becoming quite high profile so I decided it would do little harm in the big scale of things to me (25, 20€, 16) but may make a difference in somebody else´s world.

So today, to put my money where my mouth is for Blog Action Day O8 : Poverty, I gave loans to two women who sell clothes in markets, one in Tajikistan and the other in Azerbaijan. You can choose who you´d like to loan to: we all have our prejudices at the end of the day, whether we like it or not! (Funnily enough I´m unlikely to invest in a butcher´s...)

I got round to thinking about my hard-up mates... musicians, artists, film-makers, actresses, dancers... and thought... it´s all very well when you´ve got a proper job! But then I thought, well, Kiva helps you organise yourself into lending groups, why not create a lending group and then ask people to chip in on a loan paid through one person´s account (and lent by the group)!? Where there´s a will, there´s a way!

For me it´s a case of "what goes around comes around" a little magic touch of karma in life! The idea is that when the lender repays the loan... you can reinvest in someone else... and then someone else... and someone else... in these days of credit crunching, does it sound so crazy?

Now I´m sure philosophically or politically speaking there are bound to be some niggles, call me naïve, call me idealistic... anyhow this amount of money in my everyday life might otherwise be wasted on countless other useless fripperies or simply stuff I forgot lay at the bottom of the fridge!