Yes, even You can change the world
I swear I'm not that much of a company shill (although I could go on about the great deal I just got on a used PlayStation 2 with 2 Guitar Hero controllers and about 20 games), but I really love eBay for the new Microfinance site they've launched:
MicroPlace. Invest wisely. End poverty.
Of all the big ideas that have been thought up to make the world a better place, I think Microfinance is the biggest. I certainly don't know enough about it to explain it completely. For that, I highly recommend Muhammad Yunus' book Banker to the Poor. Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his work with the Grameen Bank that he started in Bangladesh to make small loans to the poor. Basically, you give a very poor person a very small loan and it makes a very big difference in her (usually, they are women) life and her entire community. And the very big idea was that it could be a loan, that it would be paid back with interest, and that it could be a profitable business. In other words, a win-win.
MicroPlace is a new site that lets anyone help to provide microfinance loans to poor people all over the world, by letting people invest even very small amounts (minimum $100) in various microfinance organizations. Note that this is an investment, not a donation. It's not a very high paying investment, and I'm sure it's not worth the risk in a strictly economic sense, but if you think of it as a donation that actually gets paid back with interest, it's pretty amazing. The site lets you choose where you want your money to go (or which organization you prefer to invest in) and has some great stories of examples of how the money gets used. It's extremely easy to use and if you're a PayPal user (more company shilling), it couldn't be easier to invest the money.
I wonder how many people are going to donate money to those who lose their houses in the fires in southern California. It's terrible to lose your home, but imagine comparing those people's situations to those of the people MicroPlace will be helping. In countries like Nigeria, Ghana, Nicaragua, etc., over half of the country lives on less than $1/day. (Those and other horrifying numbers are available on the MicroPlace site.)
Poverty could be ended with a little help from the world's wealthy people (like us).
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