How Do I Lend?

You can lend as little as $20. Here's how:

• Find a project that matters to you on our site
• Send us an email telling us about yourself and the project you have chosen.
• We will email you a voucher. Pay with PayPal and credit card.
• Receive your interest payments and your money at maturity back into your PayPal account.

Microcredit is one of the most effective poverty alleviation tools around because:

• Microcredit is a hand-up not a hand out. Empowering people to help themselves is an effective way to fight poverty.
• When you give to charity you give your money away. When you invest your money, it compounds while it is invested and is available to reinvest at maturity. You will always have money to help a poor person start a business

You can:

• help a poor person start a business and work her way out of poverty
• enable an institution helping poor people expand its business
• participate in a solution that can help alleviate global poverty by helping people help themselves!

All investments carry some risk.

Historically, 97% of poor people have actually paid back their loans through good and bad economic cycles. This means that the institutions that lend to them can generally pay you back too.

And, eMicrocredit thoroughly vets these institutions to make sure they meet certain business and regulatory requirements. To date, none of our institutions have ever defaulted on their payments to investors.

It is an effective tool to fight poverty. Poor people need access to financial services just like we do.

Microcredit started out as small loans that helped the poor start a business, earn income, build assets and move from mere survival to planning for their future.

It has expanded to savings, mortgages and many other products. It is estimated that over a 100 million poor people have benefited.

However, we need $250 billion to enable the billion people who live on less than $1 a day to work their way out of poverty.