I just clicked submit on my 200th Kiva loan. If you aren’t familiar with Kiva, go check it out, it allows you to lend small amounts of money to people in the developing world. For our wedding my wife and I asked people to give us money on Kiva instead of gifts and since then we’ve been lending away.

What’s cool is that Kiva gives you all sorts of stats and data, here’s a map of where we’ve lent:

you can see it that and a lot more over on my profile page.

Unlike peer-to-peer lending like Zopa (who I recently wrote about), we don’t earn a return with Kiva. We’re essentially giving interest free loans as a form of charity. What I like though is that the money goes to specific projects.

One of the other things I like about Kiva is how global it is. It’s always hard to decide what to fund as I trawl through the projects from around the globe. We’re not quite at the level of Bill and Melinda Gates, but it gives a small window of insight into the challenge they must face.

Kiva is a great example of the power of online to connect humanity. Here’s a link with an invite code that gives you $25 of credit if you want to join.