Help Africa help itself - MyC4

My favourite Social Venture these days is a start-up called MyC4. This Microfinance paltform was launched in June 2007 by Danish Entrepreneur Mads Kjaer and CBS alumnus Tim Vang. Like its competitor Kiva it allows individual investors to provide funding for micro- and mesoloans to Entrepreneurs in Uganda, Kenya, and the Ivory Coast. However, whereas Kiva does not pay interest to investors, MyC4 is openly advocating a for-profit approach.

Mads and Tim are not shy about their ambitions for MyC4. Rather than helping at the margins through philanthropy they want to create a viable business that shall be a key player in achieving the Millenium Development Goal (MDG) of halving poverty by 2015. With un-Danish brashness they even proclaim the end of poverty by that date.

Will it work? So far I have invested small sums in about 80 loans. Three of these have already been repaid in full and none of which has failed yet. Moreover I have earned around 60 Euros interest from my loans which I have plowed back into MyC4 for further loans. Setting up an account is easy. So go for it!