Blog -

This week, we announced new details on our basic income pilot, including the size of the pilot, the study design, and the timeline: that we are preparing to begin payments to an initial pilot village in late October. The announcement was subsequently covered by Business Insider and Basic Income News. This weekend NPR separately reported […]

Read more...

From the GiveDirectly blog, co-founder Paul Niehaus writes about a recent paper on the long-term impacts of cash transfers, commenting, “A study like this from the US is news.” Commentary on using direct cash grants to help refugees also appeared this week in The New York Times, with a thorough investigation of how cash is […]

Read more...

Co-founder Michael Faye appeared this weekend on CCTV America. When asked if GiveDirectly considered putting constraints on our transfers he replied, “For a long time we’ve thought that we needed to put constraints on the poor for what they could use the money for. And the reality is that poverty itself puts constraints on the […]

Read more...

We are pleased that Business Insider has corrected several aspects of this afternoon’s piece on our basic income experiment. The original claimed that the project could run into “a fatal problem” if some people choose not to participate, which is incorrect. It is actually quite common for some people to opt not to participate in […]

Read more...

Two recent studies released by Unicef’s Office of Research-Innocenti show the positive effects of cash transfers in Africa, on both increased income as well as improvements to families’ overall livelihoods. In the UK, the debate on basic income continues to pick up, with major Labour leaders expressing interest in the idea. GIVEDIRECTLY IN THE NEWS […]

Read more...

This week, co-founder Paul Niehaus sat down with Inc.’s Kimberly Weisul to talk cash transfers, evidence, and basic income. On basic income he told Kimberly that in our pilot we’ll be testing things like: “does security make people relax or… take more risks?” Quartz also covered the idea of time-use and basic income this week, […]

Read more...

This week in Salon Gleb Tsipursky discussed how the evidence on cash transfers and the story of a woman living in poverty helped change his mind on basic income. Meanwhile, Vox announced that basic income will be one of the topics at their Conversations conference and Ben Schiller in Fast Company covered Canada’s opinion on […]

Read more...

This week our own Paul Niehaus spoke on French radio about basic income and mobile technology in Kenya. “Kenya is already known as a leader in new technology to use to distribute its social benefits,” he said. In other news, Taylor Mayol in OZY cited GiveDirectly’s cash programs as a possible model for fighting poverty in […]

Read more...

This week Elizabeth MacBride argued in Quartz that humanitarian aid ought to be given to refugees in the form of cash transfers. “We didn’t really test things until about a decade ago in development,” said our own Paul Niehaus in the article, “we just now have the experimental evidence that people aren’t going to blow […]

Read more...