Milaap works with on-ground partners to disburse microloans in India. As a lender, you get your principal back. The returns are the number of people whose lives you’ve touched, a metric Milaap helpfully surfaces on your personal dashboard.
I’ve lent via Milaap nearly every month for the last four years, and it has now become a monthly habit. You can filter loan profiles by region, purpose, repayment period and gender. I usually filter by enterprise development as the purpose and by women.
Repayments show up in your Milaap escrow account. While you can withdraw them to your bank account, you can also set them to be re-lent according to your criteria. There’s a wonderful compounding effect that kicks in after a couple of years – for my account, the amount I receive every month as repayments is now twice the amount I put in every month, for a neat 3x effect.
Here is how Milaap presents its dashboard
This is Milaap’s microloans site (they’ve also gotten into fundraising for causes, and into donations.). Lending’s a great way to start Doing Good this new year – and decade.