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akudha • yesterday at 8:51 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

This is my experience with Microfinance

I've been funding Microfinance loans, $25 at a time, for a while now. Just checked the numbers - I have spent only about 5K in total, made almost 68K for ~2900 loans (keep recycling the money when repayments come in).

Lost motivation for a few years in between, after Covid. Used to think it is just $25, what difference can it make? I was totally wrong. $25 won't even get a good pizza these days in most American cities, it is not a lot in the west. But it can have amazing purchasing power in Africa, parts of Asia etc.

What I am trying to say is - even if we have just $10, it is okay, it can be of immense help to someone. There is Watsi, there is Kiva, Doctors without Borders and many more great projects, like Tanzania Education Project.

Here is a very simplistic (and optimistic) calculation by ChatGPT - simply loaning $25 month consistently can help more than a 1000 people in 20 years

https://chatgpt.com/share/6ac80150-feb8-83e8-a6b0-4b162c056a...

I used to think I need lots of capital to help, this shows how wrong that line of thinking is.


Replies

codeforafrica • yesterday at 9:05 PM

Is that profit or revenue? If it was profit it would be $23 per loan which suggests that the loan interest would have been 100% which I find hard to believe.

But more importantly, can you share the details of how you did that practically? Did you do this yourself or as part of a larger organization who just took your money and paid you back later?

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