Giving effectively means asking tough questions. (We know; you all have been great about asking us some tough ones over the years.) With the holiday giving season coming up, here are the top four questions we ask before giving. Share this post and get some conversations going: Can I tell where my dollar (or pound, […]
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Candid thoughts from staff, donors, and recipients on our work and the broader movement towards cash transfers.
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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Allocating the capital – Cash in the News
In an interview with Hamilton Nolan, GiveDirectly’s co-founder discusses the current state of the debate around basic income and the details of our experiment. Elsewhere, GiveDirectly’s basic income experiment was referenced in Fortune, Business Insider, and IndiaSpend, and GiveDirectly was mentioned in The Washington Post as part of a broader shift toward cash transfers in […]
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A broad swath of society – Cash in the News
In the last week, Hawaii’s lawmakers started discussing basic income and The Economist published a piece on Finland’s basic income experiment. GiveDirectly’s CFO, Joe Huston, spoke at the North American Basic Income Guarantee conference in New York, where he described in detail our own experiment, as well as some of the early qualitative results we’ve gathered […]
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Cost-effectiveness landscape – Cash in the News
At Oxford, co-founder Paul Niehaus talked with Stanford Professor Jim Ferguson about the future of cash transfers in a conversation that ranged from ethnography to economics. Sorosh Tavokoli, one of GiveDirectly’s donors, wrote a thoughtful piece on Medium on why, after five months of research, he decided that giving cash directly was one of the most cost-effective […]