Kiva Loans - Crowd Funding. If you know Kiva then you’ll understand what a worthy idea the cause is.
Basically you can make a loan (min. $25) to people who have a business idea and as/if it works so they repay your loan, which in turn you can reinvest. “Kiva’s mission is to connect people, through lending, for the sake of alleviating poverty.” “Kiva empowers individuals to lend to an entrepreneur across the globe. By combining microfinance with the internet, Kiva is creating a global community of people connected through lending.” What i particularly like is that the money goes directly to people who have a viable business idea that can make a difference in their community. PleaseFund.Us. Business Loans, Expert Analysis and Private Investments using Crowd Funding and Open Innovation. Crowd funding and financing loans with micropayments part 1. There is new extremely powerful model emerging for fund raising and loans and it is called "Crowd funding".
This sort of internet funding first took place with charities but these days there are new sites appearing every day that offer you loans or investing into various projects. Basically it works by connecting people who need to borrow certain amount of money with all the visitors of such sites who are interested about investing small sums into multiple projects. So if you need $1000 and instead of borrowing this money from one person or institutions it will get funded by 258 unknown persons from the internet. At first glance this seems like something that would never work because there are so many scammers out there who would ruin it for everyone involved. This is exactly what these crowd funding web sites are tackling with using various very smart techniques. The Merge of P2P Lending and Crowdfunding.