Fighting Poverty with Just One Click

What we like to emphasize to people is that the Click Drive is a powerful way to do something to help alleviate extreme poverty, just from our own computers."
- Ava Morgenstern, co-coordinator of the 2006 Oxfam Collegiate Click Drive

The Click Drive, which ran from Feb. 13 to March 31, is an intercollegiate competition to raise money for microfinance loans, or small loans given to people with little or no collateral. Any individual—it does not have to be a student—can click twice per computer per day on a designated icon. With every click, 25 cents is donated toward the relief of global poverty.

Ava Morgenstern, a senior at Brandeis University and this year’s co-coordinator of the Drive, said, “What we like to emphasize to people is that the Click Drive is a powerful way to do something to help alleviate extreme poverty, just from our own computers."

The Click Drive began in 2002, when Ben Brandzel, a student at Brandeis University, was working with Oxfam America’s CHANGE Initiative. Oxfam is a non-profit organization that works to end global poverty, and CHANGE trains college students along the same route. For his group project, Brandzel proposed a national game between colleges to benefit a Web site known as povertyfighters.com.

Andy Laties, co-founder of Poverty Fighters and a children’s bookstore owner, explained that the site was meant to be a place where people can simply click an icon—free of charge—to donate 25 cents toward the alleviation of global poverty.

“We were in this crisis that that point," Laties said. “We spent a lot of money setting up site, and we hadn’t sold much advertising, and people just weren’t clicking like we had hoped. Then the Brandeis students came along."

Brandzel and his team members redesigned the site for the competition and networked with other college students across the country in order to get the word out. At the end of the Click Drive’s first run, 240 schools in 43 states had raised more than $21 thousand. In 2003, the Click Drive raised more than $35 thousand, and the tradition continues.

All of the money raised by the Click Drive comes from the sponsorship of various organizations such as Habitat for Humanity, Global Marketplace and the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance. The money donated by these organizations is invested directly in microfinance loans for individuals suffering from poverty in third world countries.

“People initially were very wary of what this was, and why they should waste 15 seconds of their time online," said senior Kartikeya Singh, the leader of the Click Drive initiative at Furman University. As of March 24, Furman University was leading the competition with $3,173 in donations and counting (updated results). “Once they understand it’s not a give-money-away scheme, that the money actually gets invested in microfinance loans and used over and over, they were willing to click."

Microfinance is a banking service that allows poor people in developing countries to take out small loans with little or no collateral. The loans must be used to start up a new business or expand a current one; often these businesses are produce or craft shops run from the borrower’s home. The Grameen Bank Web site uses the example of a woman who uses a $50 loan to buy chickens so she can sell eggs.

“As the chickens multiply, she will have more eggs to sell," the site explains. “Soon she can sell the chicks. Each expansion pulls her further from the devastation of poverty."

More often than not, the new businesses aid community development. As the owner takes in more income, she becomes able to send her children to school, feed her family, and even hire neighbors to help her.

Microfinance loans typically go to women, who are more likely to pay back the loans, as well as invest their incomes into their communities and families. According to the Poverty Fighters site, the microfinance loan repayment rate is a high 95 percent.

Once the loan is paid back, the microfinance bank uses it for another person or community’s loan, and the money keeps getting recycled.

“This is a model that is actually thousands of years old," said Laties. “Many villages have a tradition where everybody puts a whole bunch of money into a pot, and somebody gets to use it, and then pay it back, and so on. In Mexico it’s for festivals."

The first modern microfinance loan originated in Bangladesh in 1976, when Dr. Muhammad Yunus—a young economics professor—visited a poor village. He came across a group of women who were trapped in a vicious cycle of borrowing money from local “lending sharks" to buy bamboo for the stools they made and sold. The interest rates were so high that the women ended up turning over all but a few pennies of their profits to repay the loan, and then having to do it all over again.

Shocked by the situation, Dr. Yunus lent 46 women the money he found in his own pocket—equivalent to $27—at a very low interest rate. Not only were the women able to repay the loan, but they also were also able to support their families with the remaining profits. Thus, the Grameen Bank began.

“The Grameen Bank struck me as really similar to a program I did where I was lending books to schools," said Laties, who learned about microfinancing by reading Yunus’ autobiography, Banker to the Poor. “I felt like I had a connection to the idea of microfinancing, and I thought, ‘I bet there’s some way to start a company to raise funds for these loans.’ The amounts of money were so small."

Morgenstern said that while microfinancing is important to the fight to end poverty, it is only a small piece in a series of necessary approaches.

“There are larger development questions dealing with international trade relations, macro-economic structures, wealth distribution, allocation of resources, lack of political and human development, and other issues that maintain poverty," said Morgenstern. “[Microfinance] is too small an approach to tackle all of these, but it can help to do what its goal is: to help increase the incomes of entrepreneurs who are able to use the loans effectively."

Per Pinstrup Andersen, the former director of the International Food Policy Research Institute and currently a professor at Cornell University, agrees that global poverty is a larger part of social and political structures.

“What really needs to be done is for a developing country’s government to sit down with a government of a high income country and plan for the total government investment—both what comes from the outside and the money that the government itself has—and come to an agreement on a plan for long-term development," Andersen said.

Of course, conflicts on matters of economy, security and ideology prevent this from happening. Experts like Andersen call for changes in priorities on the part of governments and citizens alike.

“When you’re watching your child gradually wither away and die, and there’s nothing you can do about it—even though you knew if you just had a few dollars you could do it, that’s the kind of stuff you need to get rid of," said Andersen. “We need to make sure everybody can access the basic necessities."

According to reports published by the United Nations and other sources, about 2.1 billion people live on less than $2 a day, making up 40 percent of the global population and only 5 percent of the global income. The students who run the Click Drive said that every individual must do something to address this crisis.

“There are other reasons besides the obvious suffering that so many people experience due to poverty," Singh said. “We’re living in an increasingly complex society, and the world is becoming a smaller place. We can no long afford to look the other way. Poverty breeds situations that affect everyone, and you have to really look at it from all sides."