Get a Free $25 Kiva Certificate & Fight Global Poverty

You've long heard of the great works of Kiva, an organization offering peer-to-peer microloans to entrepreneurs in developing regions. But what if you've wanted to give but haven't had the time or money to get started?

Think MTV is offering you a free $25 Kiva loan gift certificate so you can start giving and start fighting global poverty. From their website:

Think MTV and Kiva are teaming up to help you fight global poverty. Kiva.org is a non-profit organization that enables people like you to make small loans, or microloans, to low income entrepreneurs so they can empower themselves to earn their way out of poverty.

By supporting the Kiva profile on Think.mtv.com, you will receive a FREE $25 Kiva certificate that you can loan to any entrepreneur on the Kiva site.

Use this loan to help a farmer in Guatemala, a restaurant owner in Uganda or a baker in Lebanon start and sustain their businesses to help themselves, their families, and their communities. This is a REAL way you can help REAL people. Start right now.

To get started, just visit Think MTV's website, register, and then check your Think MTV inbox for instructions on how to redeem the gift certificate to make a loan to a Kiva entrepreneur. I've just loaned my $25 gift to a group of entrepreneurs from Bolivia. What will you do with your gift certificate?

Feel free to use Sustainable Business Design (info [at] sustainablebusinessdesign.biz) as your referral source so that we can see how many of our readers made a difference! Now go loan!

Grameen America

From ABC News: Grameen America has opened in a small office in the Jackson Heights area of Queens, NYC. In following the Grameen tradition, the goal is to provide an effective, sustainable and measurable response to poverty in America, with a focus on entrepreneurial women and immigrants. And at Grameen America, if you don't have credit, you could be the perfect customer.

The concept behind the Grameen bank is simple: Charge affordable interest, encourage small, regular repayments, and provide ongoing support to every borrower. But there's another key ingredient -- the so called "secret sauce." Clients are organized into borrowing groups of five persons, and individual business loans are made to group members who are supported by the group. During regular group meetings, the members use peer pressure to encourage the other borrowers to repay their loans.

The bank itself is a profit-making business owned by the shareholders, who are the borrowers. So any profit goes back into making loans.

ABC recently aired two interviews with Muhammad Yunus: Yunus: Crediting America and Small Loan Revolution Comes to the U.S.

Read the full ABC News story here.

Yogurt in the BOP: Yunus & Danone Partnership

Muhammad Yunus and the French company Danone have partnered to create a social business enterprise in India.

According to Fortune magazine, Danone will work with Yunus to build a factory that makes yogurt. The yogurt would be fortified to help curb malnutrition and priced (at 7 cents a cup) to be affordable. All revenue from the joint venture with Grameen would be reinvested, with Danone taking out only its initial cost of capital, about $500,000, after three years.

The factory - and ultimately 50 more, if it works - will rely on Grameen microborrowers buying cows to sell it milk on the front end, Grameen microvendors selling the yogurt door to door and Grameen's 6.6 million members purchasing it for their kids. It will employ 15 to 20 women.
And Danone estimates that it will provide income for 1,600 people within a 20-mile radius of the plant. Biodegradable cups made from cornstarch, solar panels for electricity generation and rainwater collection vats make the enterprise environmentally friendly.

Rethinking the divide between profit motive and social good is an emerging trend for business, and Yunus is at the forefront of the movement. "If we can create this," Yunus says, "the world will be a much better place."

The factory, Grameen Danone, opened last year.