Micro lending sites - Kiva.org - the discerning lender perspective.

Based on the screen grabs @sme did yesterday, we could see that there were some very interesting details available for those who dig deeper.

Basically Kiva.org gives a very limited amount of information to lenders who just want to quickly make a few clicks and be done.

To more discerning lenders there is plenty of information to do your shopping around on.

For instance, Yesterday @sme gave the example of the group from Uganda that would end up paying what is very close to the equivalent of 50% interest on their loan. This is one of the high cases.

High interest rares are typically given to lenders in Africa because that is where access to financial services is possibly the worst and lending is very difficult to come by.

On Kiva you will be able to find people and projects to lend to that are charged 0% interest all the way up to well over 50%.

My personal preference is not to lend where interest rates are excessively high as that is just more likely to be counter productive and lead borrowers into a debt trap.

Also, due to the fact that the borrower has often been lent the money before you even loan it out, means, that in actual fact, you are actually part of a crowdlending initiative for the Field Partner rather than directly contributing to the person whose story you just read.

I therefore like to scrutinize the Field Partner more closely than the story.

So looking at yesterday example on can see that it is actually a bank.

Then going to their web site you are even able to get an idea of their shareholders.

Based on this evaluation it is quite easy for me to see that this is not really the type of loan I want to be making, because I don't really like banks and secondly, it looks to me, that at these interest rates, there seems to be some profiting off the poorest of the poor going on.

The point is:

There is enough information on kiva.com to allow the discerning lender to pick their type of project to fund.