Is this for real?

I followed a link today to a website that had a tower banner for Kiva.org. Anyone ever heard of it before? I think it’s a fantastic idea for a way for those more fortunate to help someone else who hasn’t been quite so lucky.

I visited the site and it looks really good. The goal is to match up “lenders” with those who need a helping hand getting their business going. It’s all about microcredit. Small loans that make a huge difference in someone’s life.

There’s a woman in Sarajevo who needs money to plant her spring crops, and a woman in Nigeria needs some money to buy fish to dry and sell, a surgeon in Nicaragua needs $1175 to build a room onto his house out of wood and many more. The woman in the photo is Agatha Adutwumwaa, a 60-year-old mother of 6 in Ghana who needs a loan of $675 so she can buy fabric in bulk and not have to travel to a nearby village for supplies quite so often.

So why does my cynical mind wonder if this is all for real? I guess I’ve run into so many online scammers that I don’t automatically think of something wonderful like this being real. I want this to be real.

Has anyone had an experience with this site? If it’s legit, I’d do my bit to help someone if the money I loaned went to the person and not to some big organization. It really pisses me off to donate to a large group only to have 15% or less of the money donated actually go to doing good works.