award tour

Frontline is doing a special in 2012 entitled AIDS in Black America. I was just reading the introductory article on the special and was awestruck by the statistics:

Every nine and a half minutes, somewhere in America, someone is infected with HIV. Half of them are black. AIDS is the leading cause of death for African American women ages 25 to 34. African American men are 6 times more likely to become infected than other men. And the rate of deaths from AIDS is 10 times higher for black Americans than for whites.

In Washington, D.C., the prevalence of HIV is higher than in the Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria or Rwanda. AIDS in America is AIDS in black America.

“When you look at the AIDS epidemic in black America and you think about black America as if it was a country unto itself, it would have the 16th worst AIDS epidemic in the world”

It’s the 21st of December and it’s crunch time for the last few people on your Holiday gift list.

Well, here’s a great gift idea which:

• Doesn’t require going to any malls or standing in any lines (You’re already interested aren’t you?)
• Doesn’t require any expensive next-day Fedex shipping (More money to spend on an actual gift)
• Works from just about any country in the world (Because Amazon.ca just ain’t the same as Amazon.com)
• Satisfies even the pickiest “person who has everything” type (I’m sure Elon Musk would like this gift and he owns Spaceships!)
• Will genuinely make the world Suck Less (Redditors everywhere cheer)

KIVA: LOANS THAT CHANGE LIVES

Don’t know what Kiva is? It’s a non-profit organization which works with microfinance institutions on five continents to provide loans to people without access to traditional banking systems. And because of grants, 100% of your money goes directly towards funding loans. That’s right, Kiva doesn’t even take a cut for operating expenses. Learn more about Kiva here.

On top of that, once the loan is repaid your gift-recipient gets to lend out the money again to another awesome cause. It literally is the “gift that keeps on giving”.

Feeling skeptical about Kiva? Don’t be. In the last 6 years they’ve loaned out $267 MILLION and the repayment rate is 98.96%. Want more stats? Kiva has TONS of data.

OPTION 1: THE SUPER SIMPLE ROUTE

In about 60 seconds you can purchase a gift card and then your gift-recipient can choose a borrower to support. BAM! Holiday shopping done.

OPTION 2: THE SUPER AWESOME ROUTE

Kiva makes it easy to search it’s currently unfunded loans which lets you custom tailor your gift. Here’s some examples:

• I have a friend who is really into woodworking and had the opportunity the other year to visit Kenya. I searched for loans around Nairobi and found Samuel, a carpenter who is looking to grow his business with a new power saw. And he’s almost paid off his first loan for a supply of timber.
• Another friend of mine is a clothing designer and she was able to spend some time in Columbia this year. A quick search in Columbia and I found Ana Lucia who wants to expand her sewing workshop with a overlock sewing machine

There’s lots of sectors to search from (Agriculture, Clothing, Food, and Housing to name a few) and over 30 different countries.

You can’t gift a specific loan on Kiva so here’s what I did (and it only takes an extra minute per gift). If you’re buying multiple gifts you’ll need some temporary email addresses but if you use Gmail this is quite easy.

1. Go create an account: https://www.kiva.org/register
2. If you need to create multiple accounts for multiple gifts, enter your temporary email address. If you use Gmail then you can easily create multiple accounts with the same email address. Let’s say your address is john.doe@gmail.com, you can just use john.doe+giftforsally@gmail.com and john.doe+giftfordave@gmail.com. All mail to those addresses will show up in your Gmail account
3. Find a loan: http://www.kiva.org/lend
4. Fund the loan. They take PayPal so you can do this just about anywhere.
5. Once you’ve given the gift, just log into the account and switch the email address over to the recipient. Then they can get updates on their loan and fund their next loan once it’s repaid.

See, wasn’t that easy? You didn’t need to battle your way through the mall. The people on your list get an awesome gift. And you helped make the world just a little better this holiday season.

Think this is a great idea? Then share it:

• Twitter Tweet
  
• Facebook
• Reddit. And post a comment if you funded a loan!
• Hacker News. And post a comment if you funded a loan!

Happy Holidays Everyone!