While your mother never made good on her threat to send your unfinished dinner to starving children in Africa, I recently heard about a local non-profit that just about will.

About two weeks ago I caught an episode of Frontline on PBS. Mohammed Yunus had just won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work developing microcredit and this episode focused on how the microlending was affecting Uganda. Much of the episode dealt with a non-profit in San Francisco called Kiva.org, that finds donors around the world to contribute to existing microfinance organizations through the internet. Potential lenders can view entrepreneurs in need and make targeted donations as low as $25 using PayPal.

The borrowers reside mostly in Africa or Latin America. Requested loans are usually less than $1,000 and fund simple businesses like selling fish or tailoring. Kiva provides a short biographical sketch of each entrepreneur and includes an expected schedule of repayment, usually 6 – 12 months. Donations go local partners that distribute the loans and collect repayments over time. Once repaid the lender can withdraw the loan or re-loan. Since these are loans, not donations, there is an expectation of repayment With that comes an element of risk. Amazingly Kiva’s repayment rate is 100%, just slightly above the 97% rate for microloans wordwide.

The day this episode of Frontline aired the number of people visiting Kiva’s website overwhelmed the servers and shut down the site. Kiva quickly had to ask for donations to pay for a new server to handle the newfound attention. Happily, Kiva is now back online an in need of contributions.