Kiva Community – The Food Bloggers
I have had enough and I am going to do something about it.
There is a famine in Somalia at the moment. There is a draught in the horn of Africa and millions are affected. There is no food.
How can there be no food in this day and age?
When we continually eat in excess and yet there are people who starve. We are talking about people who watch their children die one by one because there is no food to feed them. We are talking about people who walk for weeks with their young and old families in hope of somewhere where there is aid and lose half of their family members in that walk.
Can you imagine not having anything to eat? This is not the ‘too lazy to go food shopping and eating toasts for dinner’ kind of not having anything to eat. This is much worse. No? I can’t either.
That’s because we are lucky.
There is no better time to highlight the important of sustainable food production.
We need to do something about the food production crisis in Africa. We need to create a sustainable giving to help this happen.
Please. Let’s do something. Now.
One of the perks about being a food blogger, the most important one for me anyway, is the ability to connect with like-minded, food enthusiasts. So I would like to use my blog, and friendships with other bloggers, to drive this efforts. I would like to promote an organisation called Kiva.
What is Kiva?
Kiva is an microfinance organsation that allows people from all over the world to lend moneyto various enterpreneurs or community groups.
Basically, you lend a person, or a community group, in a very low-income country as little as US$25 so that they can finance their business. This money is then repaid back to you if all things go to plan. You can then use the money that was repaid to finance another business.
If you have never heard of Kiva at all, the Kiva website explains what they do better than I can.
If you have heard of them before and have wanted to do something about it for a while like I have, do it now
What I would love for you to do.
- Join Kiva and lend money to food production-related businesses in Africa – whether this would be helping a sheep farmer to buy more livestock, a yam farmer to buy a new equipment, a general store trader to buy more stock.
- Talk about this to your friends, family, co-workers and social networks. Write about it on your blog. Tweet about it. Anything.
- Join the lending team I have created.
I will update you on this page about our progress every few months or so and hopefully we can do something realistic to help people.
I would also like you to consider to donating to relief efforts to tackle the ‘here and now’ issue of famine in Somalia.
Don’t want to do any of that?
That’s okay too. But at least have a think about what you would be comfortable in doing to help the situation. Start by caring. That’s all I really want to get through to you.
