It has begun! As I write, field officers in Bomet County, Kenya are beginning to enroll the first (post-pilot) households into the largest basic income initiative in history.The past 19 months since we announced our plans to test UBI have been remarkable. The debate over basic income continues to rage, from skeptics who call it […]
Blog - Yearly Archives: 2017
Candid thoughts from staff, donors, and recipients on our work and the broader movement towards cash transfers.
Operations
An update on fraud management in Uganda
Recently, we finished investigating and resolving a meaningful case of staff fraud in Uganda, and are sharing the results and lessons publicly. As in previous cases, we want to set a norm that charities report this stuff. Fraud is a fact of life in any charitable work and needs to be discussed openly, not kept […]
Operations
Working after Harvey: nuts and bolts
We recently kicked off an experimental project in and around Houston to let folks give directly to people affected by Harvey. (See here for more on why, exactly.) This is a good new challenge for our team: we know we can get money to remote villages in the middle of Ugandan swamps, but can we […]
Operations
What are we learning from Texas?
Disaster response is, sadly, often a disaster. We give hundreds of millions of dollars to big organizations with great name recognition but poor track records executing. Sometimes we collect truckloads of random stuff and ship it ourselves, hoping that it happens to be what people need. (Guess how that story ends.) If ever there was […]
Operations
GiveDirectly for Harvey recovery
Like many of you, we’ve seen the flooding and devastation created by Hurricane Harvey, and we’ve wished for a way to help those families directly. Unfortunately, there’s still no way for the public to send money directly to those families in need. So when some folks from our team said they wanted to head to […]
Operations
Update on UBI and the Kenyan election
Folks, We’ve decided to postpone the launch of our basic income initiative in Kenya until after the new election. Earlier this month Kenya’s Supreme Court voted to nullify the August 8th presidential election results. Presidential candidate Ralia Odinga challenged sitting president Uhuru Kenyatta’s 54% win and appealed to the Supreme Court that the election had […]
Uncategorized
Let them decide – Cash in the News
A story about GiveDirectly’s universal basic income initiative came out last week, airing multiple times on All Things Considered with a feature on the front page of NPR’s homepage. The piece was the first in a series about unconditional cash transfers and their potential to end extreme poverty. Elsewhere, a new tech founder joined the […]
Uncategorized
Our main goal is to learn – Cash in the News
Basic income featured prominently in the news this week with an op-ed on the shortcomings of the Finnish study in The New York Times, coverage from Vox dispelling common critiques of basic income, and a handful of articles about Silicon Valley’s rising interest in basic income. GiveDirectly’s CFO Joe Huston also spoke with Brazilian magazine […]
Uncategorized
A world where 8 men own as much wealth as 3.6 billion people – Cash in the News
Comic Relief, a large British charity, announced their support of GiveDirectly and cash transfers this week in a blog post on the topic. Additionally, our co-founder Paul Niehaus was featured in news pieces on KPBS-San Diego and in a survey of basic income studies in Scientific American. Prof. Tavneet Suri, one of the principal investigators […]
Uncategorized
Not everybody wants a goat – Cash in the News
In a 30-minute documentary, ABC Australia profiled GiveDirectly’s work in Kenya. They spoke at length with both Caroline Teti, our External Relations Director in Kenya, and Mitch Riley, our Regional Director. They also featured a range of GiveDirectly recipients, from one who used his transfer to start a band, to another who is growing hundreds […]
Year
Category
- Donation Info (3)
- Operations (85)
- Opinions (79)
- Recipients (46)
- Research (25)
- The Future of Cash (3)
- Uncategorized (91)