Kiva

Many people are familiar with Kiva. It's a microfinancing website that hosts profiles for people in third world countries who need help to raise a certain amount of funds. You can lend them money to assist their efforts, and after they make enough to offset the loan, the money will be returned to you. Kiva prides itself on its ability to offer an opportunity for you to directly help an individual and watch their progress as their business continues. Well, Kiva may not be as transparent as it seems. What if you found out that the person you were lending money to had been given their requested loan in its entirety one week ago? The truth is, another organization approves and distributes the loans even before each person's profile is publicly set up on the website. The money you are lending is pooled by this middle-man agency and then doled out as seen fit. Kiva is not as direct as many still believe it to be.

This information does not affect the integrity of Kiva because it still stands as an organization that allows for a better standard of life, however the money is distributed. As long as the people who need money are getting their money, and people who lend money have that money returned to them eventually, what does it matter how the money got there? That said, the strength of Kiva really isn't as a microfinance organization alone. People are attracted to it because they are under the impression that they, as an individual, are directly influencing the life of another person. If Kiva advertised the truth, the number of donors would drop severely because it would no longer appeal to the basic human instinct to help out other human beings. Again, I think that this is a very smart decision on Kiva's part. The core problem that it seeks to correct is poverty, poverty that could be surpassed if people were just given a chance. Yes, it could be said that Kiva takes advantage of people through a couple of carefully concealed details, but the fact is that Kiva still presents opportunities for those who would have had none. And isn't that what really matters?

Although this article does not tackle the problem of poverty directly, Kiva's goal is to share opportunities with people from third world countries, and by creating a website that persuades people to allow these opportunities, Kiva slowly increases the quality of life elsewhere in the world. As the article asserts, it does not matter whether Kiva is being directly truthful. The problem it tackles is that we are naturally caught up in the world around us. Although it is debatable if it is our responsibility to share our personal wealth with that of another country, Kiva does a great job of assisting these individuals by drawing an emotional response out of us. Either way, the fact of the matter is, their quality of life is so much worse, in general, making it that much harder for hard-working people to get by.