An alternative way to help alleviate poverty

Many people care about alleviating poverty. However, some of those people are averse to donating money to charity for whatever reason (it promotes indolence, it prevents people from taking responsibility for themselves, it undermines economic efficiency, etc.). The trick for such people is to find a way to alleviate poverty that nevertheless promotes their ideals. Well, Kiva may just be such a solution. Kiva is a website that enables ordinary people with some disposable income to use their capital to finance small business ventures in developing countries through existing microcredit institutions. I'm not going to go into detail about how this works; you can read about it yourself. But the basic idea is simple: Entrepreneurs in developing countries are credit risks; thus, they are unable to secure the capital they need to finance business ventures. Microcredit organizations fill the gap by lending money to such people. The loans enable entrepreneurs to start up a business or grow an existing business. Such businesses provide income and jobs to developing areas, as well as provide necessary goods or services at a reasonable expense to their clientele. Thus, microcredit (ideally) enables people in developing countries to take responsibility for their needs, promotes economic efficiency in an area, and instills pride and dignity in the entrepreneurs, all of which aid in poverty alleviation. The bottleneck for microcredit institutions is coming up with the capital to loan. That's where you can make a difference: you can loan some of your money (through microcredit institutions) to entrepreneurs. (I stress loan; your money comes back to you via repayment.) The bottom line: regular people who have a little capital can make a big difference for those who lack such capital and who are excluded from traditional financial institutions from getting their hands on it. At the very least, Kiva is worth a look.