Kiva – On-Line Microfinance
Kiva is almost a cross between peer-to-peer lending and micro-finance.
You choose an entrepreneur with a business in some faraway country, who needs some finance to either start or expand their business. The business might be a recycling business in Pakistan or a cafe in Vietnam, but the list is endless. You then contribute something like $25 to the loan they require.
The About page on their web site tells you more. I just signed up and then lent $25 through my PayPal account to a pharmacy in the Congo to buy more drugs. Of the pukka sort that is! It was a very simple process, where you just sign in and then start lending in chunks of $25 to those borrowers you choose from a map of the world. I have since made a loan to a woman starting a restaurant in Ecuador. I chose Ecuador, as I have experience of the country, so know a bit about the way they work.
So far they claim they have lent over $337 million dollars and they have a near 99% repayment rate.
I regard any money, I give to Kiva as a donation to charity. If I get any money back, then that is a bonus. If I get all my money back with interest, then that’s an investment.
I think the big disadvantage of Kiva is that it appears you have to pay by PayPal or a credit card, whereas Zopa or funding Circle can be fed using a direct bank transfer.
Perhaps if you’ve had a clear-out and got rid of unwanted clutter through eBay, Kiva is a good way to spend your PayPal funds creatively.
Remember too, that most of our charity donations are either made by cash or credit card, often through something like JustGiving. A lot of these will be increased by Gift Aid.
Regular Charity Donation
There are some charities I support and others I don’t. For instance as someone who has lost his wife and son to cancer, anything with cancer or loss in it, gets my consideration. On the other hand charities who use chuggers don’t. You will see from the links on the blog, a couple of the charities that I currently support.
So I had this idea to set up a suitable payment for all of these and other charities every year on my birthday, which just happens to be in a few days time. The advantage as I see it, is that because of the payment date they will be easy to find, modify and if necessary remove.
I have chosen to do it on my birthday, as that is a good psychological day for me. I suspect it is for others too! There is also this feeling that you’ve made another year, so perhaps these payments are your present to say thanks for still being here.
I will of course know that on my birthday, I better have a certain amount in my bank account. But then a reminder on my computer for say the first of August every year, would cure that.
I also feel that say £50 each year for ten years is probably better than £500 one year and then a whole lot of aggro as the charity tries to get more.
When in the future I pop my clogs, it will also be easy for my executors to sort out my charity payments. Especially if you put a little note in your will, explaining the payments. I think a good solicitor could write a nice clause for a will saying that some of the estate would be distributed to various charities in proportion to the birthday standing orders.
Since I wrote this piece originally, I’ve set up two of these charity payments.
One was for a small charity and all I needed was their bank account number and bank sort code.
For a national charity, I actually chose them from a list on Nationwide’s on-line computer system.
My only worry is that the charities get the Gift Aid right!
But let’s face it, bankers have had a lot of bad publicity lately and perhaps putting a Gift Aid check box, when you choose a charity from their list can’t be the world’s most difficult programming task.
I would welcome the views of anybody involved in charity fund raising.
What To Do With Old Oyster Cards
If you have finished using your Oyster card, like I did, when I got to an age that entitled me to a Freedom Pass or perhaps you are sadly leaving London for good, there are two things you can do with it.
You can donate it to charity by dumping it in a box like this one at Liverpool Street station.
Oyster Charity Box
Railway Children is an international charity that fights for children who live on the streets.
Or you could ride several times on the Emirates Air-Line.
A Memory of Liverpool University Panto Week
My late wife and I, both went to Liverpool University and the Rag Week then, was called Panto Week and it was rounded off by a fancy dress ball called Panto Ball. I don’t know whether it’s still the same, but the aim of Panto Week was to raise money for various charities.
One year, the Panto Secretary was a girl, who wasn’t particularly liked. So that year, a male student, went to the Ball dressed in exactly the same elaborate and expensive ball-gown she’d hired for one of the other balls earlier in the year. She had fairly recognisable hair to say the least and an appropriate wig was secured. She was reported to be absolutely incandescent and even more so, when she found out that her look-alike had been danced with by something like fifty gallant engineers.
Wot No Chuggers
I took this picture of a desolate Angel in Islington today.
Wot No Chuggers
You will notice that the pavement is without the dreaded chuggers.
Any ideas?
It’s Not All Depressing News!
Clicking through the BBC News website this morning is particularly depressing.
We have the story of the all-Labour Newham Council trying to offload some of their residents who need houses on Stoke-on-Trent. That would be an interesting commute. Governments for too long, have ignored the problem of housing in the South-East and London in particular. Only yesterday, Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London was asking for more funds to create more school places in the capital.
You can understand, why politicians on the far-right have been calling for an immigration clampdown. But being from two immigrant lines myself , I can’t complain can I?
We have an imbalance in the number of houses in the UK and the number of people we have here. The main solution is to build more houses, which the government appears to be doing. But also we should ensure that the houses we have are fully occupied. It could be said, that I’m greedy living in a three-bedroomed house by myself!
And then we have the story about how The Netherlands, which many think is one of the more stable of the Eurozone countries is in trouble.
I could find equally depressing stories, such as how Clare Squires died in the London Marathon.
But in some ways that story has a remarkably heart-warming ending as many are contributing to her cause; The Samaritans. The Reverend Chad Varah would have approved.
So perhaps the immense wealth of human spirit will win out! If you want to contribute to Claire go here.
A Course In Chugging?
They’ve just had a guy on the radio, who runs a course at South Bank University on charity fundraising. How to chug properly is a substantial part.
Surely, we can think of more worthwhile University courses?
Incidentally, they were chugging for Save The Tiger in Islington last week. It would be better if they did this outside the Chinese Embassy!
After all we’ll only save the tiger, if we convince the Chinese to change their ways. I wonder if the Chinese are keen on saving pandas, is that they have no culinary or medicinal use for them!
There is a big piece in The Telegraph today about how the Local Government Association is getting a bit fed up with them and is calling for a clean up of legislation. A spokesman is quoted as saying.
“Government needs to remove the double standard which means volunteers collecting coins for a local hospice need a licence, but agency workers seeking pledges for national charities do not.”
I would agree as a local hospice is much more important than a big national charity. I think though that methods of donation like Just Giving are better. I regularly see an ad and send a small amount. The trouble is some ads are on the Underground and mobile phones don’t work down there.
Jon Snow Is Everywhere
It’s a good cause and I agree with the charity’s aims.
Trees for Cities Advert with Jon Snow
Adverts for Trees for Cities are everywhere on the Underground and they feature Jon Snow.
I was at Liverpool University, just before Jon Snow organised the protest against Lord Salisbury, who at the time was Chancellor of the university. There must have been an earlier protest, as I remember something about 1968. In Engineering, who didn’t take too much of a political stance. the reasons were a bit above our head. Although, we did think that Lord Salisbury was not the sort of old right-wing political buffer, who should hold that position. Wikipedia says this about the protest in 1970.
Apart from his political career Salisbury was Chancellor of the University of Liverpool from 1951 until 1971. In 1970, students at the university staged an occupation at Senate House to demand his removal, over his support for apartheid and similarly reactionary views.
I think it is true to say, that today, anybody with those views wouldn’t hold such a position.
In the end Jon Snow was rusticated for organising the protest, but the University did later award him an honorary Doctor of Letters in 2011.
C’s tutor at the University was Robert Kilroy Silk. He was also one of the organisers of the protest against Lord Salisbury, but I have read that at the last minute he didn’t turn up. It couldn’t have been because he was giving a tutorial to C, as she had graduated from the university in the previous year and we were living in London. Obviously, no punishment was handed down to Kilroy Silk.
C always found him odious and I can remember her stinking with tobacco smoke after she had been to one of his tutorials, where he chain-smoked Capstan Full Strength all the way through.
He obviously left the right impression on her, as once we were standing next to him at Newmarket racecourse and no matter how I tried, I couldn’t get her to approach him and speak of her times at Liverpool under his tutelage.
So now I think justice has been done. Kilroy was here, briefly and Jon Snow is everywhere. Sadly C is no more, but I still have her memories of her tutor in my mind.
Islington Seeks To Ban Chuggers
According to this article in the Islington Gazette, the council is thinking of banning chuggers.
About time too!
Hare Krishna In The Rain
I hadn’t seen them on Oxford Street for some years, but they were there last week in the rain.
Hare Krishna in the Rain
We may think of them as harmless religious nutters.
But a couple of years ago, I heard their work in improving school sanitation in India widely praised by the Projects Director of UNICEF in a lecture at Emmanuel College in Cambridge.
The Anonymous Widower 