I joined http://Kiva.org and I love it. Help a poor person, and when they are stable enough to pay you back, take that money and go help someone else.

Yup u r right.... and in the process keep helping ppl!

Kiva doesn't pay out any interest, nor provides loans directly. It provides money to local microfinance institutions and helps provide cheap loans, so no - it's not used to pay back interest to another party.

Also, this organization has been endorsed by the New York times, BBC, Oprah, Forbes, Time, CNN, Reuters, Wall Street Journal etc. All of which you can bet have done their due dilligence before throwing support behind it.

You can read more about their endorsements here:

http://www.kiva.org/about/press/

---

Added on August 31, 2008, 5:04 pmIn those days Kiva had so many people willing to help and not enough loans to fund - (good problem to have

As a result, only sometimes only loans from 1 country were available. I remember once when they RAN out of poor people to loan to because so many users funded the business so fast. Now Kiva has made further inroads so you'll definitely get people in need from every continent.

---

Added on August 31, 2008, 5:06 pmThere's always a risk they can't pay you back. In which case you take it as giving a donation to that poor person. No, you don't get any interest for loaning them the money. It's an act of charity.

Only 1-2% of the loans don't get paid back. A whopping 98% of them do, so the odds are pretty much in your favor!

http://www.kiva.org/about/risk/statistics/

---

Added on August 31, 2008, 5:08 pmGuys - I've started a Malaysia group for Kiva. If you guys want to make more loans in Kiva join the team at:

http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=community...eam&team_id=173

Once you join the group and every loan you make will count towards the group and help raise Malaysia's profile within the Kiva community

This post has been edited by friedbeef: Feb 14 2010, 07:18 PM

The Malaysian team now has 54 members, have helped more than 400 people around the world and have disbursed more than RM37,000 in Mircroloans.
We're running a program on the Malaysia group http://www.kiva.org/team/malaysia ... if we hit 100 members by end March 2010, I'm going to personally loan out another USD$500
So come come, join in, loan more, help more people, and lets change the world one loan at a time!

Once you join the group and every loan you make will count towards the group and help raise Malaysia's profile within the Kiva community

No, columns within news organizations are opinionated, and they have favorable reviews of it.


New link here: http://www.kiva.org/press



The microfinance partners. It's not a free lunch for 3rd world entrepreneurs. Just a cheaper one. read here for more details.
http://fellowsblog.kiva.org/2010/03/01/why...nterest-at-all/
Everything is audited by 3rd party, and there is an amazing amount of transparency and ratings for each microfinance partner. If you feel one partner is dodgy, find another person to loan it to. You as a lender make that final decision.


Because there's no way to join microfinance here like what Kiva does. Better to help others than to do nothing. After all, you're not giving your cash away, just loaning it. When it becomes easy to help Malaysians next time - simply withdraw the cash from Kiva and pump it in to Malaysians. Or - one day maybe Malaysians will be on Kiva as well.



This post has been edited by friedbeef: Jun 21 2012, 05:47 AM

Latest update from team Malaysia:

Number of Team Members 122
Number of Loans 1,276
Number of Loans per Member. 10.5
Total Amount Loaned usd$33,025 or Rm$104,210