We sent a cash transfer to our 1 millionth household this fall. In 2011, our first year operating, we paid… 99. See the growth in real time:
The very first GiveDirectly payment ever
Below is GiveDirectly’s co-founder Rohit Wanchoo making our very first test payment ever. Before we were instantly enrolling and paying tens of thousands people at a time in Togo, we took a more manual approach.
With more funding, we can reach more people
In 2020, GiveDirectly committed $26M in cash transfers to 163K people in Kenya alone. This represents less than 1% of the 16.4M people living in extreme poverty in Kenya. That year, we also worked in Rwanda, Liberia, Uganda, Togo, the DRC, and Malawi, where another 103M people are living below the extreme poverty line. Over the years, we’ve made significant advancements in targeting, delivery, and fundraising.
Based on our track record of growth, we believe we could reach 2 million people a year working just in the countries we already operate in (including the U.S.) with the technology that we have today. With an average transfer size of $1,000, this means we are building the capacity to deliver $2 billion a year.
These are just the numbers from our first decade; you can be part of ending extreme poverty in the next.