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The MiFi Report

MiFi Editorials
Posted on February 24, 2009 - by James

Recycle to Eradicate Poverty

The MiFi Report is excited to present you with a program that celebrates the last two Nobel Peace Prize concepts: environment and microfinance. Electronic waste like cell phones pollute the environment (up to 35,000 gallons of water per phone) and microfinance has been proven to be an effective poverty alleviation tool.  In response to these issues and as a fundraising technique The Chiapas Project (along with the Grameen Foundation), a Dallas based 501(c)3 non profit founded by Lucy Billingsley, created a program called Recycle to Eradicate Poverty.
 
In one sentence, they recycle used cell phones to fund microfinance loans 
to the poor.

At www.turnphonesintoloans.org/, they allow anyone who has access to the Internet to get pre-paid baggies and make a difference for free.  After entering in your information, they send as many baggies as you want to your address within 3-5 business days so that you can in turn distribute them among events, in offices, to pass out, etc. Each person simply puts their cell phones inside a baggie (up to 5 per bag) and places it into their mailbox. 

Using this process, they hope to beat the One Million Cell Phone Challenge.  Recycling one million cell phones across America will save 350 trillion gallons of water and allow 100,000 women to rise from poverty through microfinance).  Click here to watch our short video or here to wach our longer video on youtube.
The MiFi Report proudly supports RTEP and their unique and extremely beneficial approach to poverty eradication. For more information, you can visit their site here.

Read more about RTEP on these blogs:

http://grameenfoundation.wordpress.com/
http://www.seattlemicrofinance.org/turn-phones-into-loans/2009/02/15

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 3:00 pm and is filed under MiFi Editorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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