Sharifa needs USh 200,000 to grow her business (a little under $100).  Eventually she’d like to open a beauty salon.  She learned her business skills through a program run through the microfinance place managing her loan, BRAC Uganda.

I don’t know about you, but there’s no way I can look at this young lady and not chip in $25 toward her loan via my team at Kiva.org. (You almost always get paid back, btw — the repayment rate is close to 100 percent.)

Sharifa’s is the 1800th business I’ve invested in so far via Kiva. So far, out of over $45,000 I’ve sent out, I’ve lost less than 30 bucks. And after visiting entrepreneurs on four continents so far, I’ve seen how much good this can do with my own eyes. (If you like the idea, join my team and get started right now!)

I’m hoping to visit the good folks of BRAC Uganda on the next trip for the book.

More to come!

After my 2008 round-the-world luxury hotel reviews for Forbes Traveler, I took the money from that gig and plowed it into more than 1800 microloans in 53 countries, almost all via Kiva.org. Now I’m traveling the developing world to see the results, meet amazingly strong people, and share their creative and inspiring stories.

This space will soon carry stories and pics from along the way. If you’d like me to speak to your group, here’s a video sample and here’s the place to call.

If you’re popping in from BoingBoing, TMW, or HuffPo, please bookmark and come back. Updates will increase in frequency shortly. Thanks!

It’s the biggest grant in Kiva’s history, and they’ll use it to further spiff up the website, hook up with more microlenders in the field, and generally do more good do-gooding more.

If you’re not up on the whole Kiva thing, the quick intro is here.  And if you haven’t yet joined my lending team, we’ve made more than 2400 loans to mom-and-pop shoestring operations in more than 50 countries. Hop on board here!

And here people think the iPad is a game-changing technology.

A harbinger of the world’s poorest becoming just another profit center for the world’s richest? Or an inevitable growth stage of a successful model, a natural expansion of a system that encourages self-sufficiency for the poor? Or both?

Finally — somebody is standing up for things that everyone already likes.

So desperately needed.

Last year, my dear friend Jane was running Caprica (the Battlestar Galactica prequel), and on the strength of my real-world travel writing and the country summaries in Who Hates Whom, she thought I’d be a good choice to devise backstories for the show’s planets (the “colonies of Kobol”), amplifying the existing tangential references in the original BSG into fuller political histories, giving Caprica’s writers an internal bible for consistency.

Naturally, I jumped at the chance — this was like being a Star Trek fan in 1968 and being asked to write the show’s history of the Romulans for use in future episodes.

I didn’t figure this would be published, but whoa — turns out NBC/Universal has edited my memo to fit the DK Eyewitness Travel Guide format, licensed the resulting pamphlet with DK, and published a limited run as if it’s a real full-color DK travel guide to be released in a limited run at the San Diego Comic Con — but it’s also on sale at the NBC store.

I don’t think this will ever be in stores, so if the show becomes a cult like BSG, it could become a collector’s item.

Neat!