Why Everyone Should Get Funded (Once)

> It seems incredible to me that someone would consider funding a profit-making venture to be an act of philanthropy.

I've traveled a little bit - for-profit investment seems to improve quality of life more consistently than purely charitable philanthropy.

I think there's two reasons why - first, for-profit investment is carefully measured with a clear goal in mind. Charities almost never measure their results against a control group, so it's not clear how much the charitable donation affected things relative to where the area was heading anyways.

Second, for-profit investment has the chance to become self-funding after a little bit, while charity is often more focused on shorter term consumption. There's exceptions, though - libraries and universities, in particular.

But if your goal was to have the next generation of a poor area have as many of its children grow up to have happy, productive lives possible - $100 million in for profit investment seems more likely to do that than $100 million in pure donation. Maybe the pure donations have a greater effect of quality of life over the next day, week, month, and year, but over the next generation, investment seems to drastically outperform charity in improving quality of life.

> It seems incredible to me that someone would consider funding a profit-making venture to be an act of philanthropy.

Fortunately, it doesn't seem incredible to the people at Kiva -- http://www.kiva.org/