What charities do you support?

I got an email today from a source-of-ideas-for-blogs service called Plinky. Today’s email was a summary of the ideas for the last week. I liked 2 of those ideas; I’ll answer them, one per post.

“What charities do you support, and why?”

The first thought I had is “two: Kiva and Doctors without Borders (MSF)”. Then I developed the thought further: “Why?” The explanation that was going to follow is already written into another post, but thinking again about it made me realize that I only support one charity: MSF, as Kiva is not strictly speaking a charity.

Kiva gives a financial service, loans, to entrepreneurs that wouldn’t get them from commercial banks. The same situation happens with us: how many banks would not grant us a loan to start a company in Spain at the moment? If we found an investor, we would deem his action as an investment, a sound investment, not a charity act.

The charity act when lending money through Kiva is in fact the little donation you may choose to give to Kiva itself (to cover their operating costs) and the giving away the opportunity of earning some interest on that money… not much:

• At the moment I put in Kiva ~250$ a year,
• The interest I could get out of this would be ~4$ a year (if well invested may be 20$),
• The 250$ may pay for about 12 loans of 25$ (assuming some of them will be repaid within that year and the money is re-loaned) and I generally give a 5% donation to Kiva on each loan… that is another 15$…

So out of these two concepts I give only 20$ to charities!

(Luckily I give some more to MSF… why? You can guess it)