Kiva

[Firemaster]

I read about this site in the paper today, and it looks pretty cool. The site sponsors many people from places like Africa, helping them get on their feet and start up their own businesses, store, etc. by getting people from all over the world to donate small amounts of money directly to the people.

Basically how it works is that you load your account on the site with money from your Paypal account, then you choose who you want to lend the money to. The site has a large list of people they sponsor, and since you choose who you help sponsor, you are not just giving your money to some faceless orginization, but to people. Then, once the person you help sponsored gets things running and starts paying back his/her loan, the money you lent gets returned to your account and then you can take the money out or choose another person to lend to.

One thing to note is that there isn't actually anything that says that the person you lend money to has to pay their loan back, but the site claims, I think, roughly a 98% repayment rate, and you can choose to lend as little as $25 at a time, so I'd say it's a fairly safe investment.

At the least I think it's worth a look. The site is http://www.kiva.org/