Just giving

Seven years ago I wrote here about a site called Kiva.org. I had met the co-founder of this charity when she came to Oxford in 2007 and was intrigued by her idea. Jennifer Jackley had been inspired to start the site by Muhammad Yunus’s work on microlending — the practice of issuing small loans to people in the developing world who would other-wise have no access to credit.

At Kiva.org, rather than giving money, you lend it. You choose people and businesses, mostly in the poorest parts of the world, and advance them a fraction of the amount they want to borrow, typically $25. The loan is then paid back to you monthly, usually over a year. You can withdraw it or, more commonly, lend it to someone else. It is a kind of circulatory charity.

When I wrote about Kiva, I created a small lending team for Spectator readers to join: www.kiva.org/team/spectator. I checked last week, and after seven years the group has 95 members. But what astounded me was that those 95 people have made a total of 7,000 loans, amounting to $191,000. The cost? Only the modest interest forfeited by not depositing the money in a conventional bank.

Coincidentally, on the same day I learned we had made 7,000 loans via Kiva, a friend emailed me about another idea using technology to re-engineer the aid industry. It’s called Givedirectly.org, and if you’re the kind of person who hates the idea of your charitable donations funding what James Delingpole calls ‘a bunch of Ruperts with Soas degrees in sustainability, zooming around in Land Cruisers in search of hot French doctors from Médicins sans Frontières to shag, while helping the local economy barely one jot’ — well, you’ll love it.