Good Causes - Kiva

It has always been important to us to celebrate the contributions of women. Every year since 2017, we have made some new minifigures for International Women’s Day (IWD) - creating little minifig tributes to awesome women from history or from the modern day who have done incredible things. 

Back in October 2020, we decided we wanted to give a portion of the money made from these minifigs to either a charity or an organisation that supported women and girls. We looked at a variety of different charities and organisations, and Kiva really stood out to us as a great option. They are an international organisation, who lend out money to help people to set up or expand their small businesses or to pay for their education.

It really appealed to us that, instead of just donating money, we could help give women a leg up as part of their entrepreneurial journey. We therefore started giving Kiva 20% of sales of minifigs from our International Women’s Day range. The money is given as a loan. We do not receive interest on these loans, and once the money is paid back, we put it back into the pot so that more women can receive loans from us through Kiva.

Through Kiva, we have now been able to support over 200 different projects, and we continue to expand this as time goes on. The women we supported in the early days were:

  • Eleni in Tonga who has a weaving business
  • Sifah in Uganda who works as a farmer
  • Vosjava in Albania who is growing cherry orchards
  • Rasmata in Burkina Faso who sells cosmetics and 'pagnes' (the colorful wax cloth of western Africa)
  • Zamyra in Tajikistan who needed a loan for higher education
  • Gladys in Kenya who needed a loan for her children’s education
  • The female chief executive of Techno-Hill in Myanmar - a renewable energy company
  • Las Señoras Bonitas Group in Nicaragua who needed a loan to buy fruits and vegetables for one of their businesses
  • Mujeres Trabajadoras Group - a group of women in Paraguay, including Florencia who needed a loan to buy products for her hair salon 

If you’d like to find out more about Kiva and the women we are currently supporting, take a look at this link.

And if you’d like to buy a minifig from our inspirational women range, you can find them on our website here.

These days, we have started splitting the money raised from our IWD minifigs between Kiva and the Chrysalis Youth Empowerment Network.