Kiva

Traveling around Academic Earth, which is a sweet website unto itself, I discovered a site called Kiva. For those of you who have never heard of Academic Earth, it is a website that has viewable lectures from a number of top rated schools in America. Among them are Princton, Yale, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc. Profs agree to have individual courses filmed and put online so people can watch them for free. The website lacks an interactive component where members can discuss the course but hopefully that changes in the future. I am currently watching a course from Berkeley called "Current Issues in International and Area Studies". This course is just a series of guests. The guests all seem to be pretty decent thus far which is good because the Prof kind of sucks.
Anyways Kiva, introduced by one of the guest speakers of the aforementioned course, is a website that helps hook people up with individuals in the third world who require micro finance loans to start their businesses. The pay back rate is about 97.5% which means that if someone were to look at the website as a donation system and not an investment it would mean for $500 you could be doing the equivalent of about $20000 worth of help. A lot of the entrepreneurs on the website seem to have genuinely decent ideas and the website has a decent track record from what I read. I haven't signed up yet, though I think it is a possibility. I urge anyone interested in the world of micro financing to take a look even if it is only out of interest. The minimum loan increment is $25, a lot of the loans guarantee against currency risk and many of the organizations have a long term perfect record. You could probably help out many people while the initial $25 remaining safe.
FYI, There are 'communities' on Kiva that allow you to both communicate with like minded people and coordinate your loans for the maximum benefit of a particular segment (gender, nationality, industry, etc.). Within these communities the group who has lent the most money? "Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists and the Non-Religious" with a distant second being "Kiva Christians".