Milk and Money

by Andrew Tobias

MICRO FINANCE

Give a guy a fish and you feed him for a day.  Teach him to fish and he starves to death.  Ah, but loan him the money to buy his first fishing rod and not only do you set him and his family on the road to prosperity, you get your loan repaid.  Which you can then re-loan, if you choose, perhaps to a woman who needs to buy a sewing machine.  Or seeds.

 

One of my best investments yields just 2.5% interest (taxable, no less), but allows Shared Interest to catalyze hundreds of micro-loans to poor South African women. 

 

Another group Charles and I support is FINCA, "providing financial services to the world's lowest-income entrepreneurs."  Already working with 700,000 of them in 21 countries, it seeks your help to do more.  Click here.  And don't miss its donation calculator.  See the astounding impact $50, let alone $5,000, can have.  (Gather the kids around to work through the numbers with you.)

 

And here's another great one, backed by eBay:  Microplace.  You can choose to back a micro credit effort anywhere in the world (even the U.S.).  You'll see "examples" of the kinds of borrowers your investment will go to fund, but not be at risk on any specific micro-loan.  What fun!  I just funded a bunch of loans like this one (charcoal) and this one (baking) in Ghana and this one (pig s---) in Costa Rica.  In 21 months (in the case of the Costa Rican investment, some are longer-term, many shorter), I'm even quite likely to get my money back with 1.5% interest.  But if the interest seems silly, another way of looking at it is by comparison with charitable giving, where you not only get no return on your money, you get no return of your money.

 

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