I made my first microloan today. I first heard about it when Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace prize last year. Empowering the impoverished with small amounts of money sounded like an especially cool idea.

Microcredit is a financial innovation which originated in developing countries where it has successfully enabled extremely impoverished people to engage in self-employment projects that allow them to generate an income and, in many cases, begin to build wealth and exit poverty. -Wikipedia

Kiva.org was the first microcredit organization on the web. They’ve grown to the point where they must limit user’s contributions in order to allow everyone to participate.

Success: the point when you’re forced to stop people from doing good. It’s amazing that someone, even a poor student, can actually help fight poverty.