In their own words: Initial reactions to free money

Insights from Helen and Kevin, Teresa and Odhiambo, and Christine Can you imagine a stranger coming to your door offering a year’s income, no strings attached? Neither could our recipients, until it happened (and even then, many still didn’t believe the offer was real). In the interviews below, three randomly-selected recipients recount what went through […]

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This week in cash transfers

Food Ministry suggests cash transfer of food subsidy on pilot basis – March 5, 2015 – The Economic Times Ghana: Leap 1000 Launched in Tamale – March 5, 2015 – All Africa – LEAP 1000, an extension of the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) program, which provides cash transfers to poor households with pregnant women […]

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This week in cash transfers

Africa: World Bank Helps Senegal Strengthen Social Safety Nets – AllAfrica – February 19, 2015 – Government of Senegal launched a 40.5 million dollar International Development Association credit to help Senegal establish the building blocks for a national social safety net system and provide targeted cash transfers to poor and vulnerable households Can Digital Cash […]

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This week in cash transfers

Every so often, we’ll be sharing recent news about cash transfers from around the world. Here’s the latest: Cash transfers can plug PDS leakages: study – The Hindu – February 1, 2015 – study estimates that almost half of grains released through PDS did not reach intended beneficiaries in 2011-2012, and that cash transfers may […]

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Holiday break in real-time data

Since we relaunched this website last month, the performance charts you see throughout pipe in data from the field in real-time as our field team carries out its work. So, we thought we should let you know that the team is taking a well-deserved break from December 20 to January 4, to recharge their batteries […]

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News round-up: Digitizing cash transfers

We’ve used mobile payments to deliver cash transfers since launching in Kenya in 2009. But many cash transfer programs around the world – including large-scale programs run by governments – still operate with physical cash, which is often costly, slow, and prone to error and corruption. Increasingly we’re seeing programs shift to mobile and other […]

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Fighting fraud in Uganda

We recently dealt with our worst fraud case to date, with 2% of a round of transfers in Uganda diverted. This incident brought to light vulnerabilities which we have since addressed, and we don’t expect changes in performance going forward. We are making it a point to write openly about this case, however, because nonprofits […]

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GiveDirectly COO’s TED Talk

“The more cash we give to the poor, and the more evidence we have that it works, the more we have to reconsider everything else we give.”In a new TED talk, Joy Sun, COO-domestic of GiveDirectly, asks us to reconsider how we think about and deliver aid, and provides evidence on the power of unconditional […]

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Heartbleed Update

We treat the privacy of our donors and recipients seriously and do not believe it was affected by the Heartbleed Bug.We confirmed that our hosting provider, Amazon, had patched the bug and then we updated all our certificates and keys. We verified that Stripe, our payments processor, did the same. We do not believe that […]

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