Kiva

Peer-to-peer lending site Prosper.com has stopped letting high-risk borrowers use its site because too many of them failed to repay their loans. The site's problem, says columnist and one-time lender Alex Salkever, is that Prosper got in the way of letting a social bond form between microborrower and microlender.

I used to be a big fan of the microlending nonprofit Kiva.org, thinking my $25 and $50 loans were really going via Kiva to that goat farmer in Kenya smiling on its Web site, and the single mother in Guatemala running a clothing shop to support her kids. Then I read how Kiva doesn't really make...

The online micro-finance charity Web site Kiva rose to be a shining non-profit success story in the recession years. It marries the trendiness of social entrepreneurship with an almost perfect combination of online applications. If you haven't used the site before (and, full disclosure, I've...

In an October 2009 blog post, David Roodman, a research fellow at the Center for Global Development, had no idea he'd set a chain of events in motion that would rock the world of person-to-person lending. But that's exactly what happened when Roodman questioned how the popular non-profit charity,...

"Cause marketing" is a current buzzword in corporate circles. It stands for a simple idea: that you can convince more people to buy your products if you promise to give some of the proceeds to a social or environmental cause.Consumers get to buy something they like and do good at the same time....