If you’ve been following our blog for a while, you know that we love Kiva. As small business owners, we appreciate having the opportunity to help other small business owners, especially those in developing countries who are dealing with far greater challenges than us.
Exciting news…we have passed the halfway point in our goal to help at least one small business owner in every country that has partnered with Kiva.
Since 2007, we have been involved with Kiva, a non-profit dedicated to fighting global poverty by facilitating microloans for small business owners, most of whom live in developing countries. Being owners of a small, local business, we like being able to help others who have small businesses in their own communities, especially those who are at a socioeconomic disadvantage.
As a small business, we like helping other small business owners to succeed, especially those who face adversity. It’s why we have been involved in funding microloans through Kiva. Our final Kiva loan for 2014 goes to Hortencio in Mozambique, a country in eastern Africa, where the average annual income is just under $1,400.
Can’t believe we’re more than halfway through 2014 and we haven’t done any Kiva loan updates this year! As you may recall, our goal as the owners of a small business is to assist with loans to small business owners in every country represented on Kiva, which is currently 78 countries. So far in 2014, we have helped with four microloans. We decided to go with a farming theme this year and are helping out those in the agricultural industry in developing countries, including Walter Alexander in El Salvador, Suurakan in Kyrgyzstan, Chamnan in Cambodia, and the Tei Pin San Village group (63 farmers) in Myanmar/Burma.
We had a great year with Kiva, loaning to a total of nine small business owners in nine different countries: Kosovo, Albania, Mali, Zimbabwe, Benin, Sierra Leone, Indonesia, Jordan and our last microloan of 2013, headed to Emmanuel in Rwanda.
As our blog readers know, we participate in pooling our money with other lenders around the world to fund microloans through Kiva to small business owners. Typically, these small business owners live in underprivileged areas but are trying to make a go at their businesses and lift themselves, their families and their communities out of poverty.
We’re happy to share that we reached a mini-milestone in our lending relationship with Kiva: our 50th loan. Since our last blog post, several of the small business owners whose microloans we helped to fund paid back their loans, and since we choose to re-loan the money rather than withdraw it, that allowed us to lend to two more entrepreneurs. We now have eight loans currently in process, including #49 to Fibrije’s shoe sales business in Albania and #50 to Alou’s bakery in Mali.
| Business owner Cosmas in Zambia |
Back in May, we set a springtime goal to help fund loans to two or three small business owners through Kiva, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that helps connect lenders and borrowers of microloans, helping entrepreneurs to improve their local economies and lift themselves and their families out of poverty. Many of the borrowers are from developing countries, albeit Kiva has borrowers from the U.S. as well.
This Spring, we’re hoping to fund two or three more microloans to small business owners in developing nations through Kiva (www.kiva.org). It’s our way of combining efforts with others on a small scale in order to make a large impact, in this case, to help in the fight against global poverty.
