“Give a man a fish, and he be hungry tomorrow – Teach him to fish, and he is never hungry again”

This is basically the principle upon which Kiva operates.

Some peoples fathers and forefathers choices didn’t bring the same amount of fruit out as some others, especially western fathers, choices did.

Is it fair? that depends upon your view. The only way to be equal is to leave all the babies to the hospital’s floor right after they are born and let them survive themselves as they can (and that still doesn’t rule out the possibility that the hospital floor of some babies happen to disappear due to earthquake, making it still unfair to those ones). If this is not the choice we decide to make, then some will have better and more capable parents than others, and that is the reality.

However, that doesn’t mean that we who happened to be born to a more successful line of fathers shouldn’t give a damn about those who didn’t.

There has been a lot of good criticism in giving direct help to people since that is like giving the before mentioned fish, making them both hungry tomorrow, and perhaps even helpless to find anything else than expecting to get another fish from us.

Kiva, however, operates with a different principle.

In Kiva, you don’t even donate money to people, but you are actually giving them a loan.

And the principle of this loan is that this loan is a life-changing loan to them, making it possible to make their dream of earning their own living come true.

While westerns dreams might be pretty expensive and vain, like dreaming a world round trip, many peoples dream is simply to have a relatively cheap tool for us to make up a living. A tool of 25 USD might be out of reach for many people, especially for the bankless people who might make even less than 1 USD a day, and this price of couple of hamburgers left uneaten by us can make these peoples dream of making their own living a true.

Not only does it make them be able to make a living, but also feed their families, and sometimes even resulting in businesses that will bring living to even more people than just themselves.

On top of that, since we are talking of a loan here, this one 25 USD will not just change a life of one man, but when he is able to pay it back you can use that same 25 USD to loan for the next unbanked poor man.

When taking into account the cumulative effect of some of these growing into businesses supporting more than just one man, by loaning this same sum again and again after getting it back, you might well be making even 1000 people be able to make it possible to earn their living during your lifetime, with just 25 USD.

To support this idea, there is now a new TELOS bounty.

Kiva has a TELOS team. Join this Telos Team, and you will get 50 TELOS.

Even better, Lend to one of the Kiva credit projects and choose to do this as a TELOS team member, and you will get 1000 TELOS.

So now you don’t need to loan 25 USD anymore, but less, since you are getting 1050 TELOS back right after you loan.

This bounty has a total amount of one million Telos to be claimed and can be claimed only once per person.

As an additional incentive, part of Devs idea is that if TELOS team can have enough people there, even KIVA will notice this and then when Dev contacts KIVA to introduce them to the benefits that Telos can offer to bankless world (as example fight against hyperinflation), they will be much more willing to hear as they see TELOS has already done something to them.

Now go and make your life make a difference!