Donate your email

Donate your email is a campaign where you accept to read a marketing email to raise money for charity. Advertisers are constantly trying to reach their consumers to market their products. While TV ads and radio commercials are not viable to many, internet and email marketting emerged as a promissing solution. However greed and abuse of email lists and deceptive practices to acquire emails have eroded the email marketting's potential and credibility. What we aspire to do is create a database of emails which will be used to send promotional marketing emails for our clients. This is our pledge to you

1. We will never sell your email address to anyone.
2. We will never spam you.
3. We will limit the number of emails delivered to you to a maximum of 10 a month.
4. We will donate ALL proceeds to charity.

Donate today.

MicroFinance and Social change

While the jury is out on if free markets are rational, one can be certain that in developing countries free markets, if it existed, are not only irrational, but also very prejudiced.

For those of you who have seen women selling vegetables in a bamboo basket, you know the difficult life vendors lead in developing countries. They are skilled traders and work very hard, but they could never escape the poverty. Let’s look at a case-study of a vegetable vendor. Typically they buy produce at 3am and sell it on the streets by 10am. The capital is Rs.300 and the sale on a good day is Rs.500. That is a profit of Rs.200 which is about Rs.6000 or $120 in monthly income, but only if the vendor had 30 good days in a row. There are bad days during monsoon when it is hard to sell vegetables on the street, there are days when the vendor is sick or there is a riot or a strike. Rs.6000 is barely enough to maintain a family of 4 and there is always debt piled up from a sickness or an injury. It is really hard to access capital with a good business case, and for a vendor with debt already piled up and a high risk business selling perishable good with little infrastructure, the odds are stacked up high against them. That’s where the infamous daily lenders come in. Dubbed 'kandhu vaddi' the lenders target the poor and the destitute and lend them as little as Rs300 in the morning and collect Rs.360 at the end of the day. For the poor fruit vendor or the samosa vendor the day starts with borrowing from the kandhu lender. For the vendor, its not really bad. The poor cannot go to a bank and borrow money for business and their only source of capital is on the streets. Even after paying a whopping 10% interest on a day, they walk away with a profit which can put food on the table. The problem is when the vendor has a bad day or is unable to make a profit, the unscrupulous lenders often harass the borrowers and try to recoup the money in ways that can neither be described as legal nor ethical. The interest owed is added to the capital and that accrues interest on a daily basis and the hole gets deeper and deeper.

What microfinance does is to lend money to the ingenious vendors and business people in poor countries and give them a chance at success. Muhammad Ynuis bagged the Nobel peace price for his work in microcredit through Grameen Bank. Microfinance is an established industry in several developing countries, however because of their for-profit business model, the institutions really ignore the needy with no assets. The costs of operations is high, it takes a person on the ground to verify the validity of an applicant and his business to be able to grant a loan. The labour for the business case validation often is as much as the loan requested. Microcredit is best done by social entrepreneur, where the goal should be social change and not profits.

If you are interested, there are several online Microcredit peer-peer lending sites you can participate in and make a difference.

1. Rang De
2. Kiva
3. Optinnow

KindSearch

Custom Search

Make Kind Search your default search. Its easy and its powered by google with no filters.

1. Go to http://www.ieaddons.com/ca/createsearch.aspx for Canada and http://www.ieaddons.com/us/createsearch.aspx for US residents.
2.  Paste

http://www.google.com/cse?cx=partner-pub-2279728524712603%3A55jgczqtc78&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=TEST&sa=Search

in the URL.
3. Name the search

4. Install the search provider.

I found it www.thehungersite.com

All I wanted to do and my concept was conceived by someone afterall! I was so releived to see this, partly because I dont have to register a domain, build an application, get yelled at by my wife for spending hours in front of the computer. The concept is powerful, clicks on the mouse changes life of many. Check it out, its nice. The Hunger Site

How can we not care?

A few years ago I saw a programme on CBC about trafficking in Cambodia, children as young as 5 year old, beaten and tortured. Here is a link to their site and a video. CAUTION: The video is very disturbing.
How can we not help? All I ask is for you to write a few words, spread the word.

Free rice - Power in number

I came across a site called freerice.com, where you play a game and for every correct answer 10 grains of rice is donated to the World Food Programme. Pretty cool concept and in perfect allignment with mine, give in kind and not in currency. Play this game, i like the vocabilary and the geographic find the country game. Its pretty addictive.