Sylvia Ng's Page

This is a cross-post from charitychamps.wordpress.com

On this blog I’ve written two previous posts on microfinance (also known as microcredit or microlending) and its effects. Well the debate regarding whether microlending solves poverty still rages on, and this month, the Boston Globe published a fairly extensive article containing much supporting material that concludes microfinance doesn’t actually do much to alleviate poverty. If you’re interested in the subject I would definitely recommend… Continue

This is a cross-post from charitychamps.wordpress.com

If you follow this blog you’d know that I’m always on the look-out for online microphilanthropies with a Canadian bent (I am Canadian afterall). For the most part I actually don’t think it really matters where the microphilanthropy is based, but sometimes it does affect whether as a Canadian I can participate in the programs, and other times it affects whether Canadian charities are the beneficiaries or not.

So I was quite delighted to disc… Continue

This is a cross-post from charitychamps.wordpress.com

If you’ve been following the debate surrounding whether microcredit works or not you’ll be interested to read A Mostly Comprehensive Guide to the Kiva and Donor Illusion Debate, written earlier this month. While I’ve written several articles on this blog about microcredit and its impacts on third world communities, I have never focused in on any particular microcredit organization, and if you could only analyze one it would obviously be Kiva… Continue

Today is day 3 of Round 2 of the Aviva Community Fund up in Canada. The slogan of the competition is "Supporting what's important to you". Charity CHAMPS is promoting microphilanthropy amongst youth, the most important, but least engaged demographic in philanthropy. That's important to us!

Also unlike a lot of the other ideas competing for votes, ours has a fundamental online and micro-action foundation which we think there needs to be more of. Philanthropy needs to benefit from the huge change… Continue

As a former eBay employee, my first approach to getting rid of things I don’t want is selling. I’ve sold all sorts of things on on eBay, and for bigger items that are hard or expensive to ship, I’ve used Kijiji or Craigslist. As great as those sites are however, there have always been 2 things limiting me from using them more: 1) it’s very time consuming to make a posting (you need to do price comparisons, upload photos, write detailed descriptions, etc.), and 2) I always think that I can probab… Continue