New Kiva Businesses

It's 5:30 AM and I'm exhausted, but what I can’t believe what I’m seeing and I wanted to tell you guys what’s going on.

Today Kiva formally announced our first four partnerships with real, full-fledged microfinancing institutions. Each one sent us five new entrepreneurs to list on the site, and we finished putting their profiles online about five hours ago. We've got 20 businesses from three different continents - everything from a Bulgarian chokeberry farmer to a Palestinian carpenter to a group of Senegalese women using solar cookers for seafood preparation.

We just finished posting these businesses at midnight and there's about $10,000 that needs to be raised. Matt (Kiva’s founder) said he expected it to take two weeks to get the money together, and I told him he was out of his mind. I predicted that all the businesses on the site would be funded within 24 hours, and it looks like it may be more like 8 hours. I don't even know how people are finding out about it this fast, because we just finished sending out the notification emails a few minutes ago. I mean, Fiona went to bed about four hours ago and she’s going to wake up to find every single new business funded. She’s going to freak out.

I can’t even imagine what the microfinancing organizations and the newly funded entrepreneurs are going to do. They’re going to go ballistic.

This is seriously unbelievable. I’ve actually got the shakes. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone else raising this much money this fast online for a charitable cause. I'm going to go try to get some sleep, but if you want to nab a Kiva business you'd better be quick about it.

By the way, in the time it took me to write this people have loaned $550.

This is gonna be big.

Posted by flow Frazao on February 9, 2006 at 08:17 AM in Kiva/VEF | Permalink