Spare Change? Send Someone to School

Ever wished there was a better way to get student loans than filling out those endless forms and signing your life away to Uncle Sam?

The debt can be imprisoning, but without the option of loans many American students would be left without opportunities for education. That’s the case for many students in the developing world, who would love a crack at Uncle Sam’s money, debt or no.

A new microcredit organization aims to give them a chance, too. Vittana, currently in beta form, is a Web site that enables person-to-person microloans to students in the developing world. Visitors to the site can make loans as small as $25 to students, who pay the money back after graduating and getting a job.

Lenders can choose a student to support, which makes looking at the Web site feel a little bit like being in the online dating market. The students currently featured are almost entirely women from Nicaragua. One assumes this pool will broaden as the concept takes off.

The organization’s founder and CEO, Kushal Chakrabarti, headed design and development of the recommendations system on Amazon.com before starting Vittana. An Ironman-running, guide-dog-training do-gooder, he admits on the Web site that "what gets him out of bed is the knowledge that he’s working on the biggest problem he could ever imagine." How’s that for social entrepreneurship?

Photo courtesy of stock.xchng