Charity vs Social Lending

Hello all..

I was looking at more options on how and where we all as team can contribute. There seem to be too many directions we can take and none less significant than the other.

I talked about Micro Financing in my last post and was researching more on what that channel brings us and if it were to be an effective tool.

That led me to "Charity vs Social Lending".

'Social Lending' concept is fundamentally against our wishful thinking of NOT making money out of a noble cause. But it did bring in few interesting angles to look at - Accountability and - Responsibility of the tasks/actions we intend to perform; how will this sustain over the long term. ( Please read my Matt Damon post few weeks back on what he does on these issues)

http://businesstoday.intoday.in/story/new-micro-lending-model-by-a-former-infosys-employee/1/16820.html

Its been difficult for us lately to identify the right recipients. Ideally we want to become an organization (or  look for one mean while) where you can interact with the person you want to work with and help them direct.
There are few organizations (http://www.kiva.org/) which does that but unfortunately our RBI has some stringent rules where in India is not listed as country they can support.

I ran into http://www.micrograam.com/ which provides us the same interface as we talked about earlier but at a fee. We can waive our profits for the loans we give but there still would be some money these NGO's will make on the interests paid back from the recipients.

Thought i will share this with you and see how you all feel about it. We need to diversify our efforts as well until we find something close to heart and are very comfortable doing it all the time.

More later.