Fox News - On the Record with Greta Van Susteran: Bill Clinton Goes 'On the Record' I was particularly intrested in this part of the discussion about Kiva.
VAN SUSTEREN: Well, that is a little bit like the one of the organizations you talk about in your book, in the new book "Giving," is, Kiva.org, which, incidentally, we put on our blog yesterday, because we thought it was such a great idea.
CLINTON: Unbelievable.
VAN SUSTEREN: Kiva.org is what? That lets everybody contribute, not just the fat cats.
CLINTON: Kiva.org gives you a chance to do what Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize for last year. And for 30 years he was one of the world's great micro-credit lenders. He made over 7 million loans, 97 percent to village women with a 98.5 percent payback rate.
And over half of the people he loaned money to worked their way above the international poverty line so that per capita income in his native Bangladesh moved from less than a dollar a day to about $570 a year, largely driven by the Grameen Bank and other projects like that in good times and bad.
So with Kiva.org, Greta Van Susteren and Bill Clinton can get on their Web site and we can see people that need money all over the world.
VAN SUSTEREN: How much money are you talking about?
CLINTON: As little as $25. You are talking about a lot of this money is loaned to people in countries with a per capita income of less than a dollar a day. You can see basket-makers and weavers in Africa. You can see a guy in Kabul, Afghanistan, who repaired radios.
VAN SUSTEREN: So if I go on Kiva.org and give $25, I can actually track to see how it changes someone's life?
CLINTON: Yes. If you go on Kiva, you can give as little as $25, almost nobody gives more than $300 or $400. And you may — let's suppose you pick a basket cooperative in Rwanda, and they want to get together after the horrible problems of a decade ago and bring people together across ethnic lines and make baskets and market them.
Let's suppose they need to borrow $400, well, you can either — you can give them $400, but you can give $25 and then eventually, let's say, 10 or 15 together will provide the $400. Then you loan them the money through a local group in Rwanda, and they report back in and pay the money back.
And every couple of weeks you can go back to Kiva and get a report as if you were their banker. They will report in, how are we doing with your money? How is our business doing? Are they repaying the loan?
Then when the loans are paid, you can take your money back or turn around and pick someone else to loan it to.
VAN SUSTEREN: It is an extraordinary program.
CLINTON: Amazing.
(CROSSTALK)
CLINTON: And it is all on the Internet. And it makes you feel like you know these people. I mean, they are — you see their picture. You know the facts of their business. You know what their lives are like.
And you know whether you are doing it alone or — and you can have like a virtual cooperative bank because you wind up — you may be joined by people all over America or all around the world in helping this particular business, whatever you pick.
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