DrakNet Web Hosting lends out a large portion of PayPal payments and all PayPal fees as a participant as a Kiva Lender at least monthly. You can follow our loans at any time on our Kiva Lender page. As loans are repaid, we reinvest those funds with a new entrepreneur.

A little bit about Kiva:

Kiva’s mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.

Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world.

The people you see on Kiva’s site are real individuals in need of funding – not marketing material. When you browse entrepreneurs’ profiles on the site, choose someone to lend to, and then make a loan, you are helping a real person make great strides towards economic independence and improve life for themselves, their family, and their community. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates and track repayments. Then, when you get your loan money back, you can relend to someone else in need.

Kiva partners with existing expert microfinance institutions. In doing so, we gain access to outstanding entrepreneurs from impoverished communities world-wide. Our partners are experts in choosing qualified entrepreneurs. That said, they are usually short on funds. Through Kiva, our partners upload their entrepreneur profiles directly to the site so you can lend to them. When you do, not only do you get a unique experience connecting to a specific entreprenuer on the other side of the planet, but our microfinance partners can do more of what they do, more efficiently.

Kiva provides a data-rich, transparent lending platform. We are constantly working to make the system more transparent to show how money flows throughout the entire cycle, and what effect it has on the people and institutions lending it, borrowing it, and managing it along the way. To do this, we are using the power of the internet to facilitate one-to-one connections that were previously prohibitively expensive. Child sponsorship has always been a high overhead business. Kiva creates a similar interpersonal connection at much lower costs due to the instant, inexpensive nature of internet delivery. The individuals featured on our website are real people who need a loan and are waiting for socially-minded individuals like you to lend them money.

Statistic Name	DrakNet	*
Number of Loans Made	19
Number of Successful Invitations	2
Number of Loans Made by Our Invitees	26
Number of Gift Certificates Given	1

This is a map that appears on our Lender Page, showing all the places the folks we’ve made loans to live.

Since DrakNet’s inception, we have donated a large percentage of our hosting space to non-profits who essentially get to “name their own price”, whether that be free or a small percentage of what a for-profit site would pay – our only criteria was that they needed to convince us that what they were doing was worthwhile. Explain to us why we should take space that we could make a profit off of, and give it to them. Most people would articulate it so well that, frankly, if we didn’t approve them, we’d feel guilty. Many, if not most, of our clients didn’t really know we did this as we didn’t generally run around telling people about it.

We wanted to do something that would speak to our values as a company, and something that we could get our clients involved in as well. Kiva popped up on our radar and just the right time.

Kiva is a non-profit with 100% of the loan going to the entrepreneur – administrative fees are covered by additional donations over the lending amount. You can browse what loans you will, and will not make – currently, DrakNet tends to focus on female entrepreneurs (though we don’t automatically disqualify men), people with younger children/people trying to support families, and we don’t make loans to business people where their business involves animal slaughter out of respect for our vegan clients (of which we have a higher than average percentage).

Sometimes, we admittedly choose loans based on whimsy – a woman in Nigeria because Nigeria is the home of the most well known Internet scams and we felt like combating the economy there any way we could was a symbolic and tangible gesture, or a loan in Bosnia and Herzegovina because that’s where a former sodier that hosts with us was stationed when he came up with “Skippy’s List“, and he tried to take down one of our servers that month after he made it to the front page of Digg.

As entrepreneurs ourselves, helping budding or established entrepreneurs in poverty-stricken countries is a case of teaching someone to fish as opposed to giving them a basket to eat for a week. We, admittedly, donate the baskets, too, but the self-propelled entrepreneur getting a leg up so that they could do for themselves and their families was very appealing. While technically a charitable endeavor, Kiva doesn’t pass out charity – these are loans to expand business, make homes safer, or to otherwise enable someone to have a chance to better themselves when they wouldn’t normally get one.

The emotional satisfaction of watching the lives of people that we helped all over the world and the investment in the future, the inherent statement that all people (even the desperately poor) are worth it has made our Kiva program one of the most satisfying we’ve ever undertaken.

We hope that our clients enjoy watching what their hosting money can do, and have as much fun as we do being involved with Kiva, even if its once removed. And if you don’t like being once removed, let us know, and we’ll send you an invitation!