Kiva makes it on Oprah

I have been a fan of Kiva since Jamais Cascio wrote about them on worldchanging. Kiva works on a simple idea: 20 people in rich countries can each lend $25 to a person somewhere half-way around the world. It’s small change for us, but that $500 can be enough for a borrower to build a decent livelihood.

99.7% of loans made through Kiva are repaid. It’s easy, cheap and changes lives; a lot of people love the idea.

They’ve had trouble keeping their servers up after receiving mainstream media attention, so when news came out that Oprah was to feature them I figured they might crash hard. They were only down for three 20 minute periods. 94,000 people visited the site that day, and 4388 new registered users lent $145,000 - more than triple their previous week’s total.

With two years of operation, Kiva has managed to get some solid data on repayment. Their knowledge and experience is paying off. What mainstream media recognition they are getting is richly deserved.

Because of the sudden influx of loaners, they have run out of businesses to fund. This is an excerpt from their site:

We’ve funded EVERY business on the site!!

[…]

With your help, one day we’ll run out of businesses forever. We at Kiva.org look forward to the day our website ceases to be a functioning microfinance site and instead becomes an online museum dedicated to showing future generations what we used to call “poverty.”