More on Kiva
Thursday, December 21st, 2006Andrew Leonard has a perceptive (and funny) piece on Kiva running on Salon.com, chiefly revolving around his discomfort with the fact that donors have to choose from among the prospective recipients. Since these are based on short, online-personals-esque profiles, you have no choice but to make snap judgments about their suitability for loans, and it’s hard not to wonder whether people are primping their profiles to bring down the $25 tranches.
While these wouldn’t be the first sell-side folks in history to try to pretty up an investment, in fact I shared some of the same discomfort. My own moment of truth involved moving past a profile for the proprietor of a “pub” -a going concern - who needed $500 for “inventory”, which see (more…)
