Guest blog | You don’t have to wait for Christmas!!

This blog was originally posted on Richard Kemp's blog and has been re-posted here with his permission.

Pictured above is Ghulam Qadir who has a recycling business in Pakistan

I have to admit that I am not an easy person to buy things for at Christmas and birthdays. I am lucky that I can afford to buy things that I need and have very few things that I want to buy on top of that except for stamps (I am a stamp collector).

National Ethical Investment Week | Six reasons why a lendwithcare.org microloan makes a good investment

As National Ethical Investment Week (NEIW) 2013 draws to a close and people within the sector call for “bigger, bolder, broader and better”[1] ethical investments from the UK, I have been thinking about how and indeed if, lendwithcare answers this call to action?

© CARE/Emilie Bailey

Why are some microfinance loans not so 'micro'?

When asked recently by a lender why many of the loans featured on the lendwithcare.org website were rather large (often around £1,000) we explained why that might be:


1. At lendwithcare we believe that supporting small to medium enterprises (SMEs) often generates waged employment opportunities for some of the very poorest segments of the population. The latter occasionally do not even qualify for a microloan in their own right. This strategy of supporting a range of businesses we believe is more effective in tackling poverty than simply supporting one type of business.

Lendwithcare.org supports important green initiative in the Philippines!

We have added our first sustainable social enterprise loan to the lendwithcare.org website to help tricycle taxi drives to acquire cleaner engines for their tricycles.  We are supporting an initiative launched by our partner in the Philippines, SEEDFINANCE and a local company called “Clean Engines Incorporated” (CEI) to help reduce air pollution in Metropolitan Manila.  This initiative aims to encourage local tricycle taxi drivers to switch over from two-stroke petrol and diesel powered engines (highly pollutant) to environmentally-friendly liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) engines.