more Fair Trade

It's Fair Trade Fortnight.  Your small change will be life changing for someone else.
Tea
Coffee
Chocolate
Bananas
Sugar
Cotton
Artisan products
Sports balls

Fair Trade Association Australia & New Zealand

the gift

Mothers' Day, on the second Sunday in May in Australia, has reminded me.  I look at all the pressure retailers place on families for days like this and would love to see it stripped back to basics. It's not to everyone's taste, but consider buying mum something that could mean a whole lot more.  

• Oxfam do Oxfam Unwrapped - buy a goat for $38.  It'll help to give a family a livelihood, or milk.
  A Lutheran long-drop loo - $60 will get a loo somewhere like Sudan and make a massive improvement to santiation, via Australian Lutheran World Service.
• At CARE $20 buys a blackboard to help teach and improve children's education or $125 will train a woman to sew so she can start to support herself.
• UNICEF have a wide range of gifts sorted into categories such as Mums & Babies and Health & Nutrition.
• I've mentioned Kiva in a recent post, but with the Aussie dollar so good against the US dollar less than $25 will get a gift card and mum can choose who she'd like to help.
• Or try a website like charity gifts where there are a number of organisations from whom you can choose gifts.

I'm sure a lot of mums/mams/moms would love it if she got to spend some time with you and had a little fun.

microfinance

Kiva is a not-for-profit facilitator that links people with microfinance lenders to help alleviate poverty in many parts of the world .  Here's a short video about microfinance produced by Kiva. 


And there's a bit more detail here http://www.kiva.org/about/microfinance

This type of lending is not tax deductible in Australia - it's a loan.

Here's how I approached my Kiva lending. I figured I'm not going to miss $10 a handful of times a year.  So, I made my initial loan of $25 (US) to a borrower and when $15 had been paid back I topped it up with another $10 and made my next loan.  I then had two loans chipping away at repayments.  When another $15 (total) had been repayed I topped it up again, but this time I added a small donation  of about $3 to Kiva to help them with their work.  Each time about $15 is paid back I top it up and relend it.  As far as I'm concerned this money is a donation - I have no intention of withdrawing it and it will keep going around in the microlending culture and continue to assist those who need it.  I'll keep reassessing my lending structure from time to time, and tweak it as I can manage.

Just a couple of things to keep in mind if you decide to help through Kiva:

• Check the repayment terms.  Some loans are paid back bit by bit each month; others are paid back in full at the end of the loan term.  The cash flow of my structure works when loans are paid back bit by bit each month.  Having said that, the more loans I have going means I can help to fund end of term repayment loans too.  Just worth keeping in mind if you're relying on the return of the money to fund your next loan.
• When you make a loan and go to the checkout, check the options for donating to Kiva. For a while it was defaulting to a $3.75 loan and you had to uncheck the option.  It may have changed, and I had trouble donating another time.
• Yes, interest rates can appear excessively high, but details of how this works is explained well here.  It's nowhere near as bad as it is made out to be, and in fact, works successfully.

Fair Trade

I remember being struck by whole towns and cities in the UK and Europe declaring themselves as Fair Trade, with plenty of publicity. I don't think it was that long ago when Fair Trade was unpublicised and more expensive in Australia. Is that still the case? Are there any cities or towns in Australia that have taken a public Fair Trade stance?