PovertyFighters.com

Andy Laties and Philip Heinrich, co-founders of povertyfighters.com, established the click-and-donate Web site on the principle that people want a hand up not a hand out. By partnering with corporate sponsors, microcredit charities, and The Microcredit Summit Campaign, povertyfighters.com is working to ensure that 100 million of the world's poorest families, especially the women of those families, receive microloans by the year 2005.

Here's how a visit to the Web site works: a visitor goes to the povertyfighters.com site and clicks the "donate" button. This donation actually costs the visitor nothing. Instead, a corporate sponsor puts up the money. (Each pledge is twenty-five cents and there's a maximum of two pledges per computer per day). That pledged money is then deposited into a loan-pool administered by the non-profit Calvert Foundation. That foundation then distributes the funds to microlenders worldwide such as Opportunity International.

Anjalai selling fish in Chennai

These twenty-five cent pledges add up quickly for people in parts of the world where wages may be only a dollar a day. For them, a loan of just twenty dollars can change their lives. A few hundred dollars can give them enough capital to start a small business.

Take the example of Anjalai, a woman with a young family and a struggling sidewalk fish business in Chennai, India. Years ago she borrowed money from a loan shark to start the business. His interest rates were so high that, year after year, all she could pay was the interest. With a loan of just $19 from povertyfighters.com, she was finally able to pay off the moneylender and begin making a profit. “There has been a remarkable transformation in my life,” Anjalai says.

Juana Castillo

Juana Castillo lives in a barrio in Brizas del Eden in the Dominican Republic. She is a good cook and wanted to start making meals to deliver to the local factories. But she could not afford a bike to deliver the meals or plastic containers to hold the food. With a small loan from povertyfighters.com, made through their microlending partner, Opportunity International, she now has a thriving business and a promising future.

Through microloans, a person with little or no collateral can borrow anywhere from $20 to $5,000. Today, 20 million microcredit clients worldwide are proving the lending system works with an incredible 95% repayment rate. The money that is repaid is then put back into the fund to be lent to other impoverished entrepreneurs.

Margaret Asare

Margaret Asare of Ghana has already repaid three microcredit loans and is well on her way to paying back a fourth. Before receiving the loan to start her poultry and egg selling business, she and her husband could not afford to pay their utilities or send their children to school. Now, their oldest son is hard at work on his studies and the family is planning to build a home in the near future.

Anyone can donate to povertyfighters.com by visiting their Web site at www.povertyfighters.com and clicking to donate twenty-five cents. Kids from around the world can make an even bigger donation by contributing a story or poem to the Writing Our World Web site at www.writingourworld.com. For every story or poem submitted, a dollar will be donated to a needy family overseas.