Why Jesse Willms Thinks Supporting Kiva Is Still The Ethical Thing To Do
Hi, this is Jack Stanton once again, filling in for my friend and co-worker Jesse Willms on his blog. He asked me to post an entry today about a discussion we had in his office last week. Over a year ago, Jesse decided to start helping out the Kiva Foundation as it works to fight poverty by offering microloans to budding entrepreneurs in third-world countries when banks are unwilling to. This can help create an emerging middle class in the third world. Jesse has been proud to support Kiva, but was disturbed by recent news articles that have put microfinancing in a bad light. He brought me into his office to discuss the situation and decide if we still wanted to support Kiva. Over the course of the next few hours, we went through all of the available information about the microfinancing controversy. What we discovered was that certain people not associated with Kiva were taking advantage of the microfinancing... more »