Microfinancing The World with Kiva: 182 Microloans across 75 Countries over 18 years

Microfinancing the World With Kiva: 182 Microloans Across 75 Countries Over 18 Years

Cows and chickens, makeup and jeans, fuel and internet connections. These are just a small portion of what entrepreneurs around the world have invested in using microloans made by PADT through Kiva. When you finish picking new microloans to finance, a screen comes up summarizing what you have done. Our $3,000 investment has provided over $16,000 towards loans. That money was pooled with other microloan investors to provide capital to individuals and groups worldwide who are striving to improve their lives for the benefit of their families and themselves.

A Nobel Prize Story Led to PADT’s Microloan Investments

We started down this road because the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank “for their efforts to create economic and social development from below.” They achieved this through a method called microfinancing, which involves providing small loans to individuals through local microbanks. These microloans gave them capital at low or no interest. One of the stories included an interview with the founder of an online microfinance fund called Kiva. We logged in, explored, moved $1,000 from PayPal, and started picking entrepreneurs to invest in. It has since become a key part of PADT’s community activities.

Money Put Into Microloans Go a Long Way

We have added $3,000 in the past 18 years with the initial $1,000 in 2007, $500 in $2010, and $1,500 in 2017. We add more money because with each investment, we donate a small percentage to cover the overhead of distributing and servicing the loans.

Here is our balance sheet as of June 2025:

You can see that our losses were small, over 182 microloans, only two have defaulted. Not a bad record.

When a loan is repaid, our credit grows until we are ready to redistribute it, which we do about once a year.

I find the stats fascinating. Here is a table of all the different activities the money has been used for:

I don’t know about you, but I find thinking about that list fascinating.

Each microloan has a description about the person or group the loan is going to, what they will use the money for, and details about the local NGO facilitating the loan. Many of the entrepreneurs do send little updates as well.

Here are the eight latest loans we have made:

Give Microloans a Try, You Really Have Nothing to Lose

Well, you may lose a little bit of cash. But most people put a few hundred dollars in. It’s also a great gift for kids, letting them decide where to invest and follow the progress of the entrepreneur as they pay back the loan.

PADT’s lender page is here.

Or, you can start your own microloan journey here.

Let us know how it goes.

AI Usage Note:

Going forward, until AI becomes ubiquitous, we will try to add notes to the bottom of our blog posts explaining how we used AI.

• To create the world map showing what countries we have invested in, I asked CoPilot to make it.
  • It tried but couldn’t get to the data it needed to create the map.
  • So I asked it to create a Python script that could do it if I downloaded the map information.
  • And it did. It was not that hard, and I’m happy with the results.
  • Find the script, required map files, and a README here.