I was discussing the topic of money with my elder brother this morning. I mentioned that I’ve been involved with a charity organization called Kiva.org and have been supporting and donating to Kiva for about a year.
My brother is a very skeptical person, and he referred me to scam.com, trying to convince me that kiva might not be a good way to donate and do charity work.
We are only stewards on this earth, and for the short while we’re here, we are to allocate resources to support appropriate persons/organizations so that more people may benefit.
I am not too concerned whether an organization is potentially a scam or not as there will be no way of finding this out by reading its website or financial statement. To me, that’s a matter for the Almighty to judge. Hence, I don’t see that micro-finance has any ethical issue, as long as the resources are being used efficiently.
Nothing is perfect. The only possible rant I may have towards kiva is perhaps the high administration fee involved. Currently, 15% of the loan amount is suggested to the donators as the admin expenses for each donation. This is rather high, and I may not fully agree. How is the administration fee for handling $1M so different from that for handling $100K? It does not make sense to me. Usually, I’d manually adjust the amount of administration fee every time I made a donation to the organization.
Kiva and many other online charity organizations are here for a good cause, and we should support them.
I suggest you take a look at Kiva.org and hopefully extend your helping hand if it’s within your means to do so.
Do good stuff!
