Today is Blog Action Day 2008. According to the site,
“Blog Action Day is an annual nonprofit event that aims to unite the world’s bloggers, podcasters and videocasters, to post about the same issue on the same day. Our aim is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion.”
This year the focus is on Poverty. I’ve decided to participate today after reading through the site and the suggested ways to participate. One in particular was to donate to Kiva. Many members of my private sites know that I’m a big advocate of Kiva and micro-loans to entrepreneurs.
You can check out my lender page here. To date I’ve only made three loans but I do believe these loans have made a difference in someone’s life. I plan to make another today.
What I really like about Kiva is that it revolves around entrepreneurship. Millions around the world have that same drive that each of us have. They wake up in the morning and have the desire to work hard at being their own boss, creating a future on their own terms and doing whatever it takes to achieve those goals.
Of course, in North America and other developed nations, the ability to start our own business or venture is relatively easy. In fact, online you can start your own business for practically nothing.
But what about people who don’t have access to the Internet? What about people living in war-torn countries like Afghanistan?
That’s where Kiva.org comes in. Kiva is working to bring funding directly to the entrepreneurs on the ground.
For example, check out Abdul Bashir, living in Afghanistan. Abdul has a shoe store in Afghanistan but needed funds to bring in new styles of shoes and have more stock so he can create a better life to his family. In just over a month, Abdul has paid back 8% of his total loan $1,075.00 of which my investment was $25 dollars.
I call it an investment because I don’t ever plan to remove the funds paid back into my Kiva account but rather the funds are then provided to another entrepreneur and the cycle continues. We can continue to help entrepreneurs grow and create ventures which in turn will allow those business owners to feed their families, create jobs and help end poverty.
So how can you help?
Make a donation today to an entrepreneur. As an Internet Marketer I invite you to join our Internet Marketing lending team here.
Take some time today and read through the various loans being requested and if you become motivated as an entrepreneur to help another entrepreneur than I urge you to take action today.
Your small micro-loan will go a long way towards helping someone achieve their goal.
UPDATE – It seems as if the surge of traffic from BlogActionDay has resulted in every active Kiva loan being funded. Hopefully we’ll see some more loan opportunities today.
