Silicon Valley's Problem

Re:Silicon Valley's Problem by radicalbyte on Monday December 31, 2012 @02:31PM (#4990520)

"Give a guy a fish, and he'll have food for a day. Teach a man how to fish, and he'll have food for a lifetime."

This is why I really love the Kiva model: instead of giving money away, you instead become a 2nd/3rd world Angel Investor.

It also makes me think about Hans Rosling's excellent TED talk about population growth and globalization: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_g...

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Re:Silicon Valley's Problem by crucialfelix on Monday December 31, 2012 @03:01PM (#4990650)

I keep a bunch of money in rotation on Kiva myself. But it's not angel investing, it's just small loans for very small businesses. If a decent sized business showed up on there then they wouldn't get sponsors I think because they would seem too well off.

and actually angel investors or crowd funding for african tech entrpreneurs is a much needed thing right now.

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Re:Silicon Valley's Problem by rhc2104 on Tuesday January 01, 2013 @03:46AM (#4992212)

I'd like to plug Zidisha ( https://www.zidisha.org )

It's a lot like Kiva, except there's no MFI acting as a middleman. Thus, borrowers pay far lower interest rates.

You see, borrowers of Kiva loans actually pay a lot in interest, with an average rate of about 35% - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiva_(organization)#Current_int... . At Zidisha, borrowers pay as little as 5% in interest.

Kiva has a pilot program inspired by Zidisha called Kiva Zip.

Disclosure: I'm on the board.

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