Vishnu Sridharan at the New America Foundation has a nice blog post on our approach and where it fits in to the big picture.

Paul recorded a discussion on cash transfers for the BBC with Duncan Green of Oxfam and Mike Jennings of the School of Oriental and African Studies. The (heavily edited) recording is available, and Duncan's follow-up blog post includes some interesting ideas.

We are pleased to have been named a "standout organization" by GiveWell, a highly-respected charity evaluator. To date GiveWell has recommended only 1% of the charities it has reviewed.

Paul writes about the case for cash transfers in Businessweek.

See first-hand what locating and enrolling poor households in Kenya looks like. Jeremy recorded the following footage on his most recent trip to the field.

GiveDirectly has been receiving media attention from Time Magazine and NPR, among others. Some highlights:

• Time Magazine's Moneyland blog called our approach "radical, if obvious." They ask: "Instead of using charitable donations to set up elaborate programs (and to cover hefty administrative costs for those programs), all in the name of helping the poor, why not just give the money directly to poor people, in as efficient a way as possible?"
• NPR's Planet Money blog covered our approach, calling it a "simple but radical"
• The Boston Globe's Braniac blog, which discusses "illuminating thoughts from the world of ideas," wrote about our ongoing evaluation.
• The authors at Marginal Revolution made a donation and blogged about it.
• GiveWell blogged about us, calling us "a charity to watch."

GiveDirectly is pleased to acknowledge a $100,000 grant from the Lampert Family Foundation. The Foundation seeks out novel, unorthodox opportunities for philanthropic investment with the potential to generate extraordinary returns to society.  This unrestricted grant will be used primarily for transfers to Kenyan households.  

Field staff in Kenya have launched a large-scale evaluation of GiveDirectly's work, funded by the National Institutes of Health and led by Dr. Johannes Haushofer of the University of Zurich in collaboration with GiveDirectly's board.  

The evaluation will use the gold-standard randomized controlled trial methodology to provide rigorous evidence on the impacts of cash transfer.  The research team will measure effects on traditional measures of well-being (e.g. income, consumption) as well as cortisol, a biomarker for stress.  More information on the evaluation is available on our evidence page.