I thought it was about time that I did a blog post about Kiva, considering I am so passionate about this form of donation. My history blog Tracking Down The Family  is where I usually blog Kiva. Click  here to see the last post I wrote about it

I decided to become involved with Kiva a couple of years ago, as I love the fact that the money went directly to the borrower. Kiva involves  small micro loans being made to small business people, often in developing countries,  to support them in their business. These are people who don’t have access to traditional banking loans.  The loans cost $25, so back then I decided to put up $100 and make 4 loans to women in developing countries who needed the money to run their small business.

I really didn’t expect them to be paid back, but wasn’t concerned, as $100 was quite affordable and I It was sort of a test case for me. I was very interested to see what the result would be. If the money was paid back, I would go on and continue my support, but if not, well it really didn’t matter too much to my bank balance.  To my delight the $100 was paid back very quickly and I re-loaned it to other lenders. So far I have made 13 loans to borrowers in 10 countries. That initial $100 has now made loans to the value of $350.00

I joined with a Kiva lending team named  ‘Genealogists for Families’ as I knew some of the team members, and given my interest in Genealogy it seemed perfect for me to become involved. We had just a few members then, but now we have 279 members from all over the world and have made 3372 loans totalling $88,850. I’m very proud when I read those statistics.

Today I was advised that I had $115 available that had been paid back so I have now made four more loans. All this for the inital outlay of $100. I have never yet had a loan default and this is now my third round of loaning the initial $100.

The loans made today were to  Lorena from El Salvador;   Sanaa from Jordan;   Bertha Alis from El Salvador;  and Delia Cristina from Honduras.