Kiva in the News

Ok, this post is coming a bit late. Been busy getting ready for the trip and now I'm dealing with jet lag and only 4 hours of sleep after 30 hours of airports and flights. The good news is that the organization I'm working with, KIVA, is going to be featured on PBS's Frontline. The show airs the evening of Tuesday, Oct 31, in St.Louis it will broadcast at 9pm. The hour long show will feature a variety of topics, along with Kiva, there will be news on Burma's dictatorship and the transformation of Libya. If you don't catch the broadcast, it should be available to watch online.

The Frontline crew hung out at the San Francisco office for a few days and then followed up with a trip to Uganda with Matt, Kiva's co-founder, to see what micro-finance was actually accomplishing on the ground. I wasn't there at the time but Jeremy put up a post of it on his blog with some pics.

Along with this great news, more good news came in earlier this month. Mohammad Yunus, who is the reason micro-finance has come as far as it has, won the Nobel Peace Prize. Here's a good article on it. If you'd like to know more, Yunus wrote a fantastic book entitled Banker to the Poor. He doesn't dive deep into the economics of micro-finance, but tells the moving story of how he came to give his first loan and how that blossomed into loaning to millions.