Kiva is an organization that empowers individuals to make charitable, microfinance loans. Anyone can look at the profiles of businesses (all rural entrepreneurs, currently all in Uganda), make a loan of as little as $25 through PayPal, and stay in contact with their sponsored business for the 6-12 months (average time) it takes to have the loan repaid.

This is a truly innovative platform for BOP microfinance, and although currently subsisting on seed money from its partner (Village Enterprise Fund) Kiva intends to be eventually financially sustainable.

(Editor's note: this post was picked up by WorldChanging; a nice discussion is ongoing)

This Stanford Social Innovation Review reports on SOFOLES --a Mexican microlending program (read more about it in a 2000 Harvard report) that has succeeded in making home ownership more affordable for low-income residents.

It's not the newest idea, but the report has interesting sidenotes; referencing the impact of money sent from migrant workers to their families in Mexico (these remittances are famously influential, both economically and politically), they mention that Margarita Quihuis has a start-up idea for a debit card company called Indigo Financeras, that would allow migrants to deposit directly to Mexican ATMs.

In August, mainstream media attention focused on the plight of thousands of Americans living in domes - most notably New Orleans' Superdome and the Houston Astrodome - after being displaced by Hurricane Katrina. For those looking to read a vastly more positive story about dome-dwelling, here it is: Cape Town-based N'Kozi Homes.

N'Kozi Homes' motto is "doing more with less" - they manufacture and sell geodesic domes (think Buckminster Fuller) as low-income housing. What N'Kozi does is build geodesic dome houses out of locally-sourced low-cost, energy efficient materials. The dome design is, in itself, incredibly efficient: by enclosing the largest volume of interior space with the least amount of surface area, they save on materials and cost. N'Kozi has taken it further - its basic introductory model measures 33 meters square, and could be erected with all solar panelling, lighting and plumbing included for around R2000 per square metre - or just under R66,000 (US$10,000) for a ready-to-live house.

Sound like an off-beat idea? The Age of Innovation and Sustainability Awards doesn't think so - they just gave N'Kozi Homes and founder Joseph Feigelson its Grand Prize. N'Kozi is looking to ramp up, franchising its technology and approaches to other parts of South Africa and throughout the developing world.