Even from here your microloan gift helps

""It was kind of a crazy idea.""

That's how Premal Shah" the president of Kiva" describes the idea of ""people lending money to people that they've never met.""

Imagine that. Because of technological advances in the Internet" it is now possible to deposit 25 bucks and become a banker to the world's poor.

Talk about people power.

When Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank jointly shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 many saw it as a validation of how far microfinance had come.

Yunus' idea went one step further when Kiva was seeded in the United States to tap into the cashflow of the developed world.

I was first introduced to Kiva when a former high school teacher of mine asked me to join. She seeded her account with a little money and made microloans to entrepreneurs from Africa to Latin America. I thought it was a fly-by-the-night operation until I did some research.

Kiva which means harmony or unity in Swahili first gained notoriety in 2007 when New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof profiled his loan to an Afghan baker. former President Bill Clinton has also talked about the group in his book Giving.

This past Thursday night the Kiva storm finally hit campus. The Carolina Microfinance Initiative hosted its first Kiva dinner a spin on Nourish International's Hunger Lunch. The Campus Y was bustling and 15 projects worth $500 were seeded that night.

Imagine that. Chapel Hill students providing the start up capital to help entrepreneurs expand their businesses and move up the income ladder.

Just imagine if our Rams Head or Lenoir dollars went to fund sustainable water projects in Uganda or bicycle repairmen in Romania.

At the core of the microfinance movement is recognizing the lack of opportunities some people face. As Ryan Leatham" the general coordinator of the Carolina Microfinance Initiative put it: ""Intellectual capacity and entrepreneurial ability are universal and equal throughout all cultures"" but it is opportunity that separates us."" 

Microfinance aims to empower people by enabling ideas that directly impact local communities to take root.

Anecdotal evidence has backed up those claims by discovering that microfinance directly empowers women and discriminated ethnic groups.

Unfortunately" some people seem to believe that microfinance weakens the cause of foreign aid. The truth is that this debate doesn't have to revolve between more foreign aid versus microfinance. The Kiva model is democratizing the foreign aid process much like Barack Obama and Howard Dean used the Web to tap into small campaign contributions.

It's enabling more people to become donors which in turn are indirectly pressuring governments to change their foreign aid policies. It's making us as students and voters more informed of what's failing and needs to change.

Nowadays you don't have to wait for the House to reauthorize a foreign aid bill or the United Nations to ask for more money. You can take that first step by attending the monthly Kiva dinners CMI is hosting.



Editor's note: Pablo Friedmann's column normally appears on Thursdays.