GiveDirectly and Segovia

4/06/2021 | Segovia merger and relationship with GiveDirectly Segovia is a financial technology company co-founded in 2014 by two members of GiveDirectly’s board, which today is owned and operated by Crown Agents Bank (CAB).  GiveDirectly uses CAB to issue payments via mobile money networks. A summary of the current relationship between the two organizations can […]

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How does a basic income affect recipients during COVID-19?

Initial results from our basic income experiment were released today. In the working paper’s abstract, researchers Abhijit Banerjee, Michael Faye, the late Alan Krueger, Paul Niehaus, and Tavneet Suri wrote: “We examine some effects of Universal Basic Income (UBI) during the COVID-19 pandemic using a large-scale experiment in rural Kenya. Transfers significantly improved well-being on […]

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International COVID-19 response now live

As of today, our international response to COVID-19 is live: you can give directly to households living in extreme poverty in the hardest-hit communities overseas. More information on this below. We are deeply concerned for these families. As the pandemic hits and governments impose lockdowns to try to limit its spread, many will suddenly be […]

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Reflections from a trip to Kenya

One of our donors recently spent five days with our team in Kenya and shared his reflections. We found them thoughtful, candid, and insightful, and asked to republish them here. — Carlos Dominguez Context note: I work at a financial firm in NYC. This firm has an “employee philanthropy bulletin board” where people discuss their […]

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4 years in the making: first cash benchmarking results released

Today we can finally share with you something we’ve been hard at work on for over 4 years: the results from our first experimental benchmarking study, a unique collaboration with USAID, Google.org, and academic and implementing partners set in Rwanda. The animating idea behind this project is incredibly simple: if we’re serious about helping other […]

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Our take on HS18, revisited

Johannes Haushofer and Jeremy Shapiro recently released a paper (HS18) estimating the three-year impacts of individually randomized cash transfers on GiveDirectly recipients. We wrote a short note on these results in February; recently there has been active discussion among researchers (e.g., e.g.), and we’ve since followed up with many of them. Our failure in original […]

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