I’d like to start 2009 with a few words of thanks to everyone who has joined the Spectator readers’ lending team at www.kiva.org/team/spectator. So far we have lent money to over 100 small businesses in the developing world, a figure buoyed by the disproportionate generosity of the Spectator’s Australian readership (including a lady from Cairns in a particularly elegant hat). We still have some way to go before overtaking the largest lending team — 1,700 people from Team Obama, since you ask — but every new joiner helps. And, thanks to the depreciation of the pound, the interest-free loans I made earlier in the year through Kiva (the loans are repaid in US dollars) have turned out to be unexpectedly profitable. So my only successful investment all year has been in a charity; there’s a moral there somewhere.
Of course there is no reason why this kind of small-scale person-to-person lending needs to be philanthropic.
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