If you’re looking for a gift for someone who has everything, and who would be interested in giving something to someone who has almost nothing, then take a look at Kiva.org. It’s micro-lending for the rest of us.

Micro-lending, as you may be aware, is the concept of lending very small amounts of money to people who live in poverty so that they can entrepreneur their way out, or at least improve their standard of living significantly. Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus introduced the idea with Grameen Bank, and it has been growing steadily ever since in various forms. According to an article in the June 2008 Harvard Business Review some 140 million have taken advantage of micro-lending so far, but that pales in comparison to the 3 billion people who live on $2 a day or less.

Micro-lending largely has still been bank or non-profit based. What Kiva.org does is open it up for anyone to make the loans. A visit to their site allows you to read about the many people who are looking for loans, and it’s a simple process to sign up and lend them money.

As is the case with other micro-lending schemes the borrowers are almost entirely women because they are more entrepreneurial and have a much higher payback rate (come on gents, get with the program!). As your selected borrower receives more loans or makes progress on their goals, or pays you back, you get update emails.

Note that this is not a donation, it is a true loan. So you get paid back. And then you can loan the money to someone else. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

The ten-year old son of some good friends of ours recently had his birthday and my wife gave him a $25 certificate to Kiva.org. After looking at the site he wanted to loan money to everybody! He searched for someone who had so far not received any loans, and was delighted to see that after he got the ball rolling, other people started loaning to them as well! He was just ecstatic, and it’s a double gift: the borrower benefits, and this young person has a sense that he can make a difference in a very personal way on a global problem.

In this cynical age, that is a gift in itself.

Related posts: Co-Creation in Emerging Market

Craig Venter, who led the charge to decypher human DNA, is now on the green hunt. According to Treehugger he’s looking for a double-wammy: take CO2 in the atmosphere and convert it into fuel (rather than fuel creating CO2 as is mostly the case today).

As we’ve described before, Venter’s overarching goal is to produce microorganisms that are able to “convert things like sugar or sunlight or carbon dioxide into fuels that people are very familiar with, like diesel fuel and gasoline,” as he himself put it. These would constitute not only the fabled second- and third-generation biofuels we keep hearing about (like cellulosic ethanol and other plant biomass-derived fuels) but even so-called “fourth-generation” biofuels — those produced directly from CO2.

Venter hopes his bugs will supplant the need for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies by making CO2 a commodity, instead of a byproduct to be disposed of. According to Venter, large, bacteria-processing fermenters, similar to those used to make beer and wine, would replace traditional refineries. He expects the first generation of his engineered bacteria to be commercially available within the next year or two years. He made it a point to stress that he and his colleagues were thinking “in terms of years, not decades.”

There are some obvious concerns about releasing such organisms into the wild, nevertheless it’s this kind of thinking we’ll need to help move us away from the global warming brink. 

In honor of Earth Day, here’s a presentation I did a few weeks ago Design Green Now in Washington. This is the slide deck I used to introduce myself and frog for ten minutes or so before the panel discussion itself. It misses quite a bit without the talk over, but you’ll get the general idea!

If you view it on Slideshare, you can see a full screen version.

I’m participating in a couple of sustainability-related events coming up:

April 1: Design Green Now, in Bellingham, WA. Along with panelists Sophia Wang Traweek, Arunas Oslapas and Marc Stoiber, I’ll be giving a short presentation and then we will have discussion and Q&A. It’s happening at the University of Western Washington. More info.

May 15-16:  Sustainable Design Seminar. Fellow frog Sara Louise Todd and I will be running a 2-day seminar for the Design Management Institute on sustainable design. This will be held in San Francisco, at frog design’s new studio which is set to open in the next couple of weeks. I’m looking forward to this one as it’s providing us a focal point for synthesizing a lot of the thinking that’s been going on about sustainability at frog. We are working hard to make it full of information that covers familiar issues like materials and process choices, but also tackles more front-end strategic choices.

This seminar will address the fundamental issues of sustainable design and introduce a broad range of frameworks and concepts for tackling the often fundamental changes that are required in how a company approaches design and manufacturing. Drawing from a wide range of sources and case studies as well as frog’s own experience, we will discuss the key issues framing sustainable design, how it can be evangelized and initiated in an organization, and how it impacts on choices of product planning, production partners, brand and marketing. The seminar will combine presentations with hands-on activities and breakout groups, wherever possible using the participants’ own products, organizations, and experiences as sources of challenges and opportunities.

Registration is required for this one, and DMI are expecting that it will fill up (there’s capacity for about 25 participants). We will be doing a repeat performance in October in Denver, CO, also.

More info.