I first heard about Kiva four years ago. Kiva is a charity devoted to allowing individuals to make micro loans directly, from one person to another. Kiva has partnered with micro finance institutions world-wide, who select qualified loan applicants. Kia sends Field Partners who interview loan applicants, take their pictures, and create a profile for them on the Kiva Web site.

It works like this:

You go to Kiva's Web site, and browse the profiles of people seeking small entrepreneurial loans. Throughout the course of the loan (generally six to twelve months) you receive regular email updates about the progress of the business, and repayment of the loan. The micro loans mean that many people contribute small amounts of money to loan to the person. When the loan is fully repaid you have the option of lending the monies again to someone else, donating the monies to Kiva.org to cover operating expenses, or withdrawing the monies completely via PayPal.

A woman in Lebanon needs a loan for $ 1,000.00. She is a sixty year old tailor, with 29 years of experience as a tailor, and two children. She wants a loan to buy textiles, which will allow her to create more items and thus generate more income. Several people join together to loan her the money, starting at a $25.00 loan, via PayPal. The loan still needs $425, and 29 days remain on the time limit of the initial request.

You can choose to loan anonymously if you wish, but many lenders choose to have public profiles. A group of Morgan Stanley investment banking professionals in a "pay it forward" effort took initial funds from their company, and increased them via fundraisers. They then put the monies in a non-withdrawable account to keep relending the funds to Kiva micro loan borrowers.

Kiva is honest about the risk of lending to impoverished peoples. But given that that snazzy latté you buy on the way to the office every morning is about $4.00, the thought of coming up with $25.00 for a charitable loan isn't a lot of financial risk. Moreover, you can keep the money to re-loan over and over when it's repaid. I note that most of the loans are currently "backfiled": that means that Kiva has already come up with the funds to loan to the entrepreneurs, but that your donation will replace those monies. I don't have a problem with that; the monies still go to the people who need them for their businesses.

For this holiday season, think about a Kiva donation as a gift; it really is the gift that keeps on giving.