I wrote about Kiva almost a year ago. It was already a very efficient way to practice microcredit to very small-scale entrepreneurs across the globe. Now it has become much better and way so cool thanks to a big change they unleashed a couple of weeks ago with the new Partial Loan Repayments method to replace the full loan repayments. Lenders no longer need to wait until the entire loan is repaid before they can relend it to the long list of small businesses in need of fresh funds.
And this list turns so short and even most of the time it is hard to find those needing the loans. Loan requests are being funded very quickly thanks to sudden availability of credit funds from the partially repaid loans -- it was US $10 million when the historic change was unleashed! If you check the loan request page on Kiva, most likely you will find a similar screen above or at most you will only see a couple of loan requests --- which you will have to act fast to fund if you don't want to get beaten by other lenders eager to release their fund credits.
Check out KivaVision to see who's making loans on Kiva and on which parts of the world they come from. Currently a loan is made every 37 seconds... that is roughly $25 in a half minute, $3,000 in a hour, $72,000 a day, and more than $2.1 million a month...!!!