Kiva Loan Update – Spring 2015

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.

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Kiva 2014 Loans (so far…)

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.

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Loaning with Kiva to Kosovo

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.

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Kiva Loans #49 and #50

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.

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Our latest three Kiva loans

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.

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