Kiva.org Extra Credit Assignment

Kiva is an organization which asks donors for amounts in twenty five dollar increments. These sums of money, coined as micro loans, go to budding entrepreneurs, which help them alleviate poverty in some cases. In other cases, they help them realize their potential, by starting a business or or fulfill a life long ambition. Kiva claims to be an international nonprofit which was founded in 2005 and based in San Fransisco. Their mission is to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty. Taken directly from their website under the 'About' section, "We celebrate and support people looking to create a better future for themselves, their families, and their communities. From this you can take away that they are a helpful organization with the goal of helping people who want to make their life better and the people around them. I did some additional research in trying to figure out the meaning of the word Kiva. the closest I could come to was meaning 'nice' in Finnish, the language of the people of Finland. So how does all of this work? First somebody needs to have an idea. Then the borrower will apply for a loan from Kiva, similar to how a bank loan would work. Then their application must go through a screening process and make sure that the person or organization and their cause is legitimatean nota scam. Then, the part where we come in, the borrower will rally support for his project and will gather money from people who are willing to donate/loan. This can be done in increments of twenty five dollars, as mentioned before, or one person could even fund the entire project. The next step after the borrower accomplishes what they were getting money for is they must repay it to those who loaned, in payments. The repayment process takes approximately twelve months or so. There is a chance that you may or may not be repaid by your borrower, depending on their score that Kiva has given them. This is the major risk you accept while using Kiva. This is why you must choose trustworthy causes to loan to. After you are finished with one project and borrower, you can put your money into another project and borrower. 

After doing some browsing on Kiva, I found a project that interested me. Jurrien is a resident of New York City, who is disturbed by the amount of trash we throw out in America. I can relate to this very much. I have noticed how much packaging that everything comes in and we all just end up throwing it away because it no longer has use to us than just, for example, a styrofoam block to help protect something in a box during the handling process is something that would fit in this category. Some things like the one mentioned above might be essential but some other not so much. Jurrien is trying to kickstart her business called Urban Tumbler LLC. She has designed reusable cups called Stojo to prevent thousands of disposable cups from being tossed out into landfills. She is asking for ten thousand dollars to do this. She is a very determined person who has been inspired by the workforce since second grade when she got a paper route and started shoveling snow for her neighbors during the Vermont winters. Malarkodi is a forty two year old married women who lives in the district of Nammakkal, Tamil Nadu in India. She has a household of five members. She wants two hundred dollars to buy cows to expandher dairy business where she sells milk and butter. Malarkodi already sells milk in her local area but wants to grow her business by purchasing fodder cows.

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