Step 1: Click once a day at TheHungerSite.com.

You’ll fund the donation of 1.1 cups of food. While you’re there, take a look at their equally worthy sister sites.

Step 2: Play at FreeRice.com.

Study for the GRE, test your English abilities, or simply bone up on your vocabulary. While you do, your clicks will generate funding for donating free rice to the hungry. Better yet, share this online game with students you know.

Step 3: Sign the petition at HelpSweden.org.

This tongue-in-cheek organization turns our concepts of poverty around and asks for a renewed commitment to the Millennium Development Goals. Read more about what makes HelpSweden a good idea.

Step 4: Put some of your paycheck into Kiva.org.

You’ll get your money back and you’ll have helped somebody to build a business or a home.

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When I began Eco Child’s Play over a year and a half ago, I pledged to make Kiva loans on behalf of our blog. After making several Kiva loans, I’ve decided it is time to donate to and highlight different organizations helping families and/or the environment around the world. This month, I have made a donation to Women for Women International on behalf of Eco Child’s Play.

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Do yourself a favor, and go watch the introductory video on the new KivaB4B site, which makes the most clear, compelling connection between entrepreneurs like yourself, and people in the countries that microfinance serves. It shows, side by side, the similar needs and activities we all have as entrepreneurs — a little boost, a bit of advice, and a lot of encouragement and community.

In a powerful synergy, Kiva, one of the top players in this realm, has partnered with Advanta, a credit issuer that is highly supportive of small businesses, to create KivaB4B. It’s simple really: You as a business owner put money towards someone via Kiva, and Advanta matches it, dollar for dollar, up to $200 a month. This may sound small, but think about it this way: If only 1% of Advanta’s 1.3 million customers put even $50 towards this, that would mean $1.3 million going to these people. Dollars that go a lot farther then they do here, making for a potentially significant positive impact for people just like yourself, really.

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Inspired by Beth’s post “Getting Less to Give More: The New Birthday Party“, I decided to let my six-year-old daughter pick out our Kiva loan recipient. She picked out a baker in Kirkuk, Iraq, whose identity is protected.

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For the past five + years my family has been practicing different ways of sharing gifts for the holidays. We made gifts a couple of years. Then we decided to pool our funds and purchase one big gift for someone in the family that would inspire their lifestyle, creativity, and passion… This year we decided that no one really need anything and we would prefer to do something together as a family to improve the lives and economies of others- invest in a micro-fund.

Microfinance creates social lending networks that gives us lenders the opportunity to connect directly with borrowers who normally wouldn’t get the support of a bank. This allows people in poor countries and rural areas who don’t have access to traditional banks or don’t have the credentials necessary for a bank loan, to start a business. The neat things it that in all circumstances (weather your money is controlled by the organization through which you lend or you choose who your money goes to) you can more or less track your loan. This type of investment has already made profound impacts on developing nations as it funds businesses that support their local economies. Instead of weaving baskets to be sold in the global market, people are able to start water distribution businesses to improve quality of life in their own communities.

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For those unfamiliar with the concept of micro-loans, allow me to give you the quick rundown. Micro-loans is the act of giving small loans to entrepreneurs in the third world. The loans can be small, hence the name micro, as little as $50, and are used by entrepreneurs in places like Nigeria, Mexico, Peru, Indonesia, and East St. Louis (zing!) to start and expand businesses. We’ve made loans to shop owners, building contractors, seamstresses, natural medicines stores, and restaurants. Each fund at Kiva.org is in the $700 - $1,300 range and our average contribution per entrepreneur is $50-75. Each loan is built using funds from multiple lenders and are paid back, interest free, in 6-9 months. We have 24 Entrepreneurs in our Portfolio and we make new loans every week or two, all paid back loans go right back to new entrepreneurs.

Micro-finance has been shown to be an amazingly effective boost to people, families, and communities. It seeds a better quality of living and is truly giving people a helping hand up rather than a stream of ‘aid’ to become dependent on. The whole teach a man to fish thing. Kiva.org has a ridiculously low default rate of .02% on $886,385 in loans, so it’s a rock solidly safe investment.

I’m as die-hard an entrepreneur as you can get, so one of the first things I thought about when the idea of redesigning and retooling Planetsave was to bring micro-loans into the picture. Jan has been saving rain forest with the site since 1999 and he was glad to have the additional resources that are available to grow out the concept to include micro-loans and buying wind credits from Renewable Choice Energy (disclosure: I was a founder of RCE).

You can visit our Lender page on Kiva to see all the amazing people we’ve invested some of our profits into. You can read more and sign up yourself at Kiva.

That’s why Planetsave is better than your website. We just fucking care more.

Microfinancing, the loaning of small amounts of money to the asset-less poor, garnered worldwide attention last year when one of the leaders in this emerging field, Grameen Bank, and its founder Muhammad Yunus were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Microfinancing reaches out to a massive economic underclass that has been shunned by the international banking and lending system by providing necessary seed capital for small ventures.

It may seem intuitive for some to believe it foolish to loan money to a person with no assets and seemingly little prospect of converting that loan into a profit and repaying it. Grameen Bank has proven that belief to be very wrong indeed. Grameen sees a default rate of only 2% on its small loans to the poor. Compare that to the 4.5% default rate on student loans within two years of beginning repayment in the US. The low default rate vindicated Grameen’s simple founding principle, that “the poor will repay loans.” The reliability of the poor to repay has also helped to make microfinancing economically viable for lending institutions in a competitive free market. In short, microfinancing has been one of the huge successes of social-capitalism.

What has propelled Grameen beyond vindication and to the Nobel Prize is that the vast majority of loan recipients have used the financing to reliably generate assets. Many borrowers, for instance, have started businesses selling phone services in their remote villages. Take the story of Sophia Nalujja (photo reprinted with permission of Grameen Foundation) of Uganda. She
has been a successful borrower from the Grameen Foundation in Uganda for many years, has started a couple businesses and more than quadrupled her farmer’s income. Stories like Sophia’s abound as
microenterprises represent an estimated 80% of total enterprises and 50% of urban enterprises in developing countries, where they are the main source of jobs for poor people.

You, too, can become a microlender at Kiva.org. Kiva provides an easy way for you to connect directly with microenterprise entrepreneurs all over the world. Photographs and thorough descriptions of the loan’s purpose make it fun to just surf around and see what people are doing to improve their lot in life. A typical Kiva loan is for right around $1,000 give or take and you can contribute as little as $25 to any project you wish to fund. Re-payment typically takes one year and you’ll receive a little interest on your investment or you can choose to make your money a gift to the entrepreneur.

Update: Our sister site Planetsave makes micro-loans a part of how they do
business, GO founder and Planetsave publisher Shea Gunther explains the
details here.