Kiva Wedding Gifts
I am not a big fan of having too much stuff. So when I got married earlier this year we decided that we did not want to ask our friends and family for gifts. However, it turned out that people felt very strongly that they wanted to give us stuff. My wife found a great compromise which allowed us to help entrepreneurs in the developing world grow their businesses and achieve economic stability by providing micro-loans.
Titilayo is requesting a loan to purchase drinks to sell, so as to be able to meet the demands of her customers.
Instead of setting up a regular gift registry we asked that people gave us gift certificates for an organisation called Kiva.
Kiva facilitates person to person micro-lending. Entrepreneurs in developing countries are able to solicit funding for their business through the kiva.org site. Potential lenders search through these listings and provide some of the cash required. As the money is repaid it can be reinvested or withdrawn by the lender.
We support Kiva’s mission of facilitating economic growth in the developing world. Also we’ve since discovered that their headquarters is a block away from our house after their wireless signal showed up on our laptops.
Liz and I chose to focus our lending in Africa because we have personal connections there. We have made 19 loans so far which you can track on our Kiva lender page.
Having Kiva gift certificates as wedding gifts worked out pretty well. The process of giving a gift certificates could be made easier though. People had to create their own Kiva account before being able to give the certificate – which provided a barrier for some people. Wedding guest who were not so internet savvy, who were wary of using their credit cards on-line or not sure about paying in US dollars just gave us cheques to buy the Kiva credit ourselves.
This kind of micro-lending is fairly new and so some people were not 100% clear about what we were asking for. I think a few mistook it for just giving money to charity in our name. Since there is the option of cashing out however it is also a very useful gift to a couple starting out.
Liz and I would like to thank everyone who contributed to our Kiva lending. We’ll be posting updates of our lending experiences here.
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