Club's recent KIVA lend focused on supporting construction |
The club’s decade-long KIVA lending portfolio exceeded $83,000 last week. KIVA is a micro-lending organization. Of the total loan value of $83,150, about $12,000 has been collected via loose change cups at meetings; the rest is comprised of paybacks, with interest. Led by Candy Behrends, last Thursday’s “lend” was decided by Dixie Weiss, Sharon Barton, Doug Eckland, and Claudette Kreuzenstein. All but one of the seven loans – typically of $100 each – were made to individual entrepreneurs in construction. To date, the club has made 849 loans in 72 countries. Just under half of the loans have been made to agricultural endeavors, another 20 percent to manufactures and construction, followed by food production. Fifty-five percent of the recipients have been women. One-third of the loans have been made in South American and Central American countries with another ten percent concentrated in each Kenya and the Philippines. It is the club’s goal to loan $100,000 by 2020. |