During the week leading towards the International Women’s Day Kiva.org ran a campaign to help fund loans to 10,000 women entrepreneurs around the world. Every month I make a new loan on Kiva and March 8th happens to be my birthday, so I was definitely going to participate!
Inspired by @stephen-somers’ example of a loan to help a prolific entrepreneur in Fiji expand her three businesses by buying piglets, vegetables, and root crops, I decided to find a similar opportunity to make a difference in someone’s life and business.
After a quick search on the website I came across a group loan to help five entrepreneurs (80% of whom were ladies) in Chwele Kenya: Janerose, Dorice, Fiona, Susan, Hassan.
Janerose, featured on the photo above, is 45 years old and has five children. Janerose strives to earn enough through her farming work to feed her large family. She’s partnered with Once Acre Fund to buy farming inputs, such as maize seeds and fertiliser. What made me decide to support this group loan was the fact that it will also cover the cost of six solar lights. Jenerose felt very excited by this too, as the lights will help improve the overall quality of life for her and her family (and the families of the other four entrepreneurs in her group). With the profits that she gains from this year’s harvest, Jenerose plans to send her children to school.
In the end Kiva’s lenders managed to fund loans not just to 10,000, but to 13,251 women entrepreneurs in 62 different countries!!
I felt so proud to be a part of Team Steem on Kiva that made a contribution towards achieving this impressive result! If you haven’t heard about Kiva.org before, I encourage you to register and join our awesome team. What makes Team Steem truly special and different from all other lending teams on Kiva is the fact that we can fund our loans partly (and sometimes wholly) by our earnings on Steemit.
As always, all SBD earnings from this post will be directed towards my next loan on Kiva.
JOIN US!
Very nice, am going to register right now.
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Micro lending programs are always great like these. They are usually such a small amount to those that are in more wealthy nations that it’s not a big deal if things go sideways. They also tend to actually help someone out; instead of, just fueling a professional “charity” to keep running. So little can change so much that most people simply never get to understand that. They don’t need to raise billions to change the world it can be done in much smaller steps. Sometimes with even greater effects in the communities around them.
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You’ve summed it all up very nicely, @enjar. Those things are exactly the reasons why I began supporting entrepreneurs featured on Kiva in the first place. It’s a hand-up, not a handout.
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Very nice! I keep on rolling my KIVA loans over as they are paid.
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