For those of you who have been keeping up with Traveling Project for some time now, you might know that I’ve been setting aside some of the income this travel blog generates and have been donating it to those who are in need of a loan on the Kiva website.   When I first started this little side project, I thought it would be a great idea to see how many people I could help around the world by making loans – a perfect fit for a blog which is about traveling around the world.  So today I can add the Dominican Republic, Paraguay, Mali and Uganda to the list of places I have made loans too as you can see in the picture above.

A complete list of countries/places around the world I have made loans to can be seen in the image below:

Donating to EDN yesterday for Earth Day put me in a giving mood, and I remembered coming across a micro-lending site called Kiva.org where normal people like you and me could help finance small loans to needy entrepreneurs located around the world, usually in third-world countries.

I decided to head on over to the site and open an account. After opening up an account I funded it through my Paypal account and made three loans of $25 denominations each to people from Nicaragua, Samoa, and Tajikistan! You can see my profile page here: http://www.kiva.org/lender/TravelingProject. The loans are usually used to help these entrepreneurs start up a new business or make improvements to their existing business.

I think helping people through Kiva fits perfectly with this blog, not to mention it makes me feel good knowing I’m helping less fortunate people. Being an entrepreneur at heart and the focus of this blog being about traveling around the world, I think there’s no better way than to help other entrepreneurs from around the world through a non-profit organization like Kiva! In fact, I think Kiva makes such a perfect fit with this blog that I gave it a permanent section on my sidebar to help promote it to my readers!

Maybe in the future I can travel to see some of these countries, and actually meet the people I have helped face to face; documenting the whole trip to share with readers of this blog! This is something I just might have to really think about and look forward too!