eBay's MicroPlace: An Investment to End Poverty

eBay's founder, Pierre Omidyar, and his wife have made microlending both a study and a reality. For those who haven't followed the story: In 2005, Omidyar donated $100 million to Tufts University to start a program dedicated to ending world poverty through microlending. The idea behind microlending is that providing small loans to impoverished people with an entrepreneurial spirit can effect real change. (The New Yorker profiled Omidyar's evolved thinking on microlending.)

Today eBay launched MicroPlace, a web site that invites private investors (like you and me) to invest as little as $100 to help provide small loans to those who wouldn't qualify for traditional bank loans. As wtih any other investment, we make that money back with interest after a specified time period.

I've written about microfinance web sites like Kiva.org that let you loan money directly to a poor family. MicroPlace is structured a bit differently in that you don't give money directly to an individual who needs a loan. Instead, you invest in Calvert Foundation Notes and the Calvert Foundation loans money to its microlending partners in economically troubled regions all over the world. (Full disclosure: My daughter works for the Calvert Foundation and worked on this project, so I'm hopelessly biased.) The Calvert Foundation will invest your note in the region of the world and the partner lending institution you select. It'll also be responsible for payment and interest to the lender. 

According to BusinessWeek, interest rates on your loan vary between 1 and 4 percent, depending on the amount and nature of the investment. Investors receive a "You've Got Cash" message on the site when they see returns.

According to MicroPlace's web site, 1.3 billion of the world's working poor live below the international poverty line, earning less than U.S. $2 a day. Since the inception of microfinance in 1974, it says, more than 100 million people—the majority of them women—have borrowed microfinance loans with historic repayment rates averaging 97 percent. With Thanksgiving just around the corner, you might want to check out MicroPlace. Next year you may have a return on your investment, and a new entrepreneur in your extended family.