After having completely changed the way we do business, study and live our lives the Internet is now about to change the way we help African people fight poverty.
By concentrating in business instead of charity.
Shirley from Brighter Days for you and me tagged me to write a post about Charity, Compassion and Caring. I decided to answer her challenge by not writing about charity, but business. Business that is all about compassion, caring and making people’s dreams come true.
Everyone around the globe shares the dream of finding a fulfilling, meaningful way of making a living for himself. A way that is good for him, and the entire community that he is part of.
It’s my dream.
It’s your dream.
And it’s Bonny’s dream.
Bonny M Kasujja is a young man from Kampala, Uganda whose dream is to teach poor kids skills that will help them make it in life. To make his dream come true he saved from his salaries until he could open a school that offers training in sports, tailoring, fashion design and cosmetology. Currently his school is able to support 80 to 95 students, but Bonny is looking towards the future and working hard to grow his school to help even more people.
MyC4.com – Eradicating Poverty Through Business
This is where MyC4 (short for “My Care For”) comes to play.
MyC4 is an initiative that lets ordinary people invest in projects of people like Bonny M Kasujja and help them make their dreams and plans come true. And not only that: MyC4 is not about charity. It’s about business. When you invest in for example Bonny’s school project, you are not saying farewell to your money, but instead the money comes back with an interest. And then you can either invest it again, or withdraw your money from the system.
Currently MyC4 is still in beta and working out the details of how it can pay the money back to the investors, so if you join it at this point, you’ll have to agree that until the details are closed, you can only re-invest the money when you get it back from the original person you invested on and not retrieve it back to your own bank account.
How does it work?
MyC4 does a really good job in explaining how the system works in videos on their front page, so I encourage you to watch the videos. But here’s a short version:
- Someone in Africa is in need of a loan and submits her profile to the system. Local associates, called providers, make sure the entrepreneur can be trusted and is someone worth investing it.
- This entrepreneur is then listed on the “opportunities” page at MyC4. Each investment opportunity is described in a rather detailed way on its own profile page.
- When you find an interesting opportunity to invest in, you make a bid: You choose how much you want to invest and at what interest rate.
- Someone can outbid you by offering a lower interest rate.
- When the average interest rate is below the interest rate that the entrepreneur is ready to pay, and the time limit has expired, the bidding closes and the money goes to the entrepreneur.
MyC4 is in beta, just like most of the web services these days. It was launched a few months ago and although it doesn’t have a long history, so far the track records looks great: 148 opportunities funded, and 100% of the money paid back on time!
The selection of entrepreneurs available isn’t overwhelming yet, but MyC4 is growing quickly and moving to new African countries, so I’m sure this will turn out to be something interesting. By supporting entrepreneurs we can help them build their society and cure poverty instead of just giving temporary help to fix the symptoms.
And if you also get your money back – with an interest – there is nothing for you to lose. This, if anything, is an example case of a win-win situation.
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Jarkko I love this idea! What a great idea to invest in people. I would guess that it is an added incentive for them to really strive hard to pay the money back too. I can’t believe the 100% results – how could an investor miss? Although not technically charity, this is full of compassion and caring!
The Internet is full of great uses and this is definitely one of the best I’ve seen. I love the pictures and profiles – it helps you feel like these are friends you’re helping. Thanks for a terrific post.
Hi Jarkko
Thanks for this post – it sounds like a good organization and I hope it succeeds. Micro lending from people in affluent countries to people in less-affluent countries seems like a great way to provide help that will result in sustainable success.
Are you familiar with http://www.kiva.org? It is a similar organization that appears to be having great success by connecting people to provide interest free loans of approx. $25 each. While the investor doesn’t earn monetary interest, they do get their money back to reinvest in another business, unlike a typical donation.
I enjoy your blog – been subscribing for about a month – but haven’t posted before – keep up the great work!
Very well written post.
MyC4 is a very interesting approach to microlending
Claus
I stumbled you! Great post! I LOVE stuff like this! I’ve never been a big believer in charity as a long-term solution. I believe it’s needed because without it, people are starving. But to give somebody the ability to care for themselves is more generous than any donation will ever be!
Thanks, Jarkko!
Good article as usual. Looks like an excellent idea. I wonder how well this scales up and how soon governments react to this.
Hey, thanks everyone for your great comments!
Shirley: Thanks! I like this idea a lot as well, and I think it’s probably even more about compassion and caring (and at least it’s more effiecent) than charity itself.
Showing the pictures and all that information makes it much easier to relate to the people who you’re investing in.
Liz: Yeah, Kiva is great too. My original plan for this post was actually to write about both Kiva and MyC4, but then when I dug deeper into MyC4 I realized that I like it so much more than Kiva that I just have to concentrate in that one.
To me the number one benefit that MyC4 has over Kiva is that it is aimed at helping African entrepreneurs. All the entrepreneurs on the site are from Africa compared to Kiva which at the time of writing the post didn’t have any opportunities from Africa.
Graham: I’m glad you liked it, and thanks for the stumble! I agree with you totally: charity is more like a short term solution to fix the immediate need, but initiatives like MyC4 make it possible to grow something that helps the whole community in the long run.
Pepez: Yeah, that’s going to be interesting to see.
I´ve used Kiva in the past, but MyC4 sounds even better. Personally, I´d like to see them expand to other continents. I live in Guatemala and there are many people here who could also use a boost like that to get their businesses going.
Microlending is such a great idea, making it possible for anyone to help people halfway around the world, not by simply giving them cash, but by helping them start their own system for earning. I love it!
Hey Genesis! Great to have you here!
I’m sure there are many other continents that would benefit from something like MyC4 – and maybe they will actually get there at some point. If MyC4 doesn’t, that could be a terrific business idea for someone else :)
Hi Jarkko – great to see this post and today 5 months later the train has started to get into action…. so to say! We have this week funded loan No 1,000 and 1 mio euro in active loans all being possible because +3,300 Investors from 52 contries have committed over 1.5 mio euro for Africa. MyC4 is now able to offer you African business for + 100 t euro weekly and growing! The current challenge is to get more Investors and capital to match the Business ready for loans – its free to invest! We will in May launch MyC4 Ver 1.0 on our one year birthday… All the best, Mads, co-founder and CEO MyC4
@Mads: How cool that you took the time to come over here and comment! Sounds like you are making great progress!
Now, it’s up to us to come and put our money where our mouth is and invest :) Thanks for making it possible!
I have a fantastic idea that came out of an ethical dilema of mine.I would gladly give 100% of my money to help the starving children of the world, my problem is and I admit it is a selfish one, Is I don’t like to go around dressed like a bum.(no offence to any one who does).So I have this fantastic idea that I believe will take off and become the most succesful companies in the world one day.I want to start a company that sells high fashion items and gives 100% of its profits to helping the worlds poor.I will dedicate my life to this, but I need help,I have neither the money or the experience to get started.I think this company will be highly successful as there is many people who feel the same way I do.I would appreciate any e-mail and read every one to me from anyone who is interested in getting involved in any way. I have ultimate faith in this idea,but I need help.
note:thats my e-mail adress (Nuri Karansue)
Kiva is great. And this idea sounds promising. But it also sounds very challenging to put into practice. If they can get this in place it will be a wonderful addition. But it taking years to really figure out what is effective and how to run it is likely in my opinion. I can’t even get the web site to load now – I don’t know if that is because they are out of business or just temporary problems with their site.
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