I found a cool post on Jigaroo about Yoga Gives Back, a non-profit that combines yoga with microfinance.  Yoga Gives back teams up with the Grameen Bank to help get loans to recipients.  With the slogan “For the cost of two yoga classes, you can save a life” I think that this is a pretty cool concept.  It uses the Grameen group model of microfinance, but applies to the lenders rather than the recipients.  Yoga Gives Back works with a specific group of people whom it teaches microfinance to, with the hopes of spreading awareness. 

With the current global economic crisis going on, people are asking many questions about how microfinance will handle the situation, and to what degree MFIs will be affected. As I was thinking about this, I asked myself “am I making the right decisions when I lend?”  I am always interested in learning about new lending platforms and usually just give each one of them a fair trial and then determine which ones I like based on user experience.  I realized that most of my decisions on who to lend to are based on how easy it is to lend and how intrigued I am by the entrepreneurs story.  However, although this makes things fun for me, it is not always the most effective solution.  To piggyback on Drew’s post discussing interest rates,  I have found some interesting posts that lenders can consider when making decisions:

-Ryan Calkins, over at SeaMo, recently made a post entitled “Nine Questions to Ask Every Microfinance Institution” which discusses some questions that the Grameen Bank has come up with to determine which MFIs are good investments.

-David Roodman discusses interests rates and lending in his blog post “When is lending just?”