"Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can "sponsor a business" and help the world's working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you've sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back." (more)

We've been researching various charity sites lately, and Chad forwarded this along to me. Turns out, the Director of Technology over there is a former colleague of Chad and I's at our old company. Basically, the jest is that you loan small amounts of money interest free ($25) to people in developing countries who need it (and are prescreened). They repay the loan, and you get your money back. You can then withdraw the money, or re-loan it out. There's no profit motive, no catch, no guarantee, no tax deduction -- it's entirely a goodwill operation, and they are seemingly doing really well with it.

I mentioned to Gavin last night that it has a sort of.... adopt-a-manatee feel to it. I know that might sound a bit... less-charitable than it should, but thats the best comparison I can come up with. You get e-mail journal alerts from the people you loaned the money to keep you posted on how their business is doing and the like. It's like Adopt-a-third-world-convenience-store, and that approach would seem to be pretty marketable here in the states.

Suggestions:

• More RSS - The journals and business pages have them, the user portfolio pages should as well.
  
• Widgets - Help spread the word on this thing and make JSS widgets people can stick on their blogs/myspace/whatever pages.
• Friends - Ability to buddy up with someone else and match contributions or distribute risk
• mod_rewrite - Maybe I'm just way to geeky for my own good, but query strings make me queezy.
  
• Even more micro - Maybe administration costs are prohibitive, but I'd love to load up an account with $50 and give 50 people one dollar.
  
• Stats - What's the most charitable state in the US? What developing countries have the highest repayment rate? What industries? People love information porn.

It's a neat service and I wish them the best of luck. I just loaned out $50 to give it a whirl, I'll blog about it again if I'm ever actually paid back ;) You can check out my kiva portfolio here.