I recently discovered an organization called “energy in common” that has an identical concept to Kiva with a slight twist. The site is a platform for individual lenders such as you and me to help provide financing for third world entrepreneurs. Essentially profiles of borrowers are posted, you choose who you want to disperse your funds towards and the money gets distributed to a micro-finance field partner which funds the loan of the borrower. The key difference is this organization funds projects which are green or environmentally friendly.
I took the plunge and made two loans. The first contribution was $25 made to Abubakar Sadiq for a solar home system. The second was $100 made to Patience Ampong for a clean burning stove. Both loans have respective repayments of 6 months and 3 months so I can’t comment on that process until later in the year. I’ll surely post another update on how things go.
If you like the green focus and looking for an alternative for Kiva I wouldn’t suggest you hop on board just quite yet. Energy in common seems to be a really young initiative. There are usually less than 10 loans available at a given time and the website is still a work in progress. Keep an eye out for this organization though. Kiva proved that a platform for micro-financing fundraising through the masses can work and hopefully this survives its infancy.
[...] this blog. You'll be able to easily keep up to date with new posts. Thanks for visiting!Awhile back I wrote about an organization called Energy in Common that provided micro financing for green projects. This is a basically a follow up to that post and [...]