“Your money goes to help this person. They’ll even write you a thank you card.” This is a familiar pledge you may have heard from charities before. GiveDirectly’s program is not a marketing gimmick, it’s the real thing. By leveraging over a decade of experience and recent technical advances in payment technologies in developing economics, we quite literally send your donation to the people you select and email their messages back to you. 

Donors do not get to choose specific people to fund and that is intentional. Evidence shows that some donors choose recipients based on factors like attractiveness, skin color, and family status, which makes for neither good social policy nor efficient operations. We avoid this choice bias by instead showing a list of people in poverty in a village yet to be funded and allowing donors to select how many to support.  

Our field team in Kenya uses government data to identify villages below the poverty line and enrolls all households in that village. Recipients who consent to sharing their information are shown on the website; those who don’t are paid using other funds. To date, only <2% of recipients have declined to be featured here. Each interview is conducted by a local field officer who does the translation in real time, and is asked to be as literal as possible; no one at GiveDirectly edits or filters these. Collecting these stories contributes little to our costs as we’d conduct regular check-ins regardless.  

Once enough donors sign up to fund everyone in the village, we schedule transfers for our next monthly payment date. We make sure everyone receives their first payment within 2 months of being enrolled. If it takes more than 2 months to match enough donors to fully fund a village, we use flex-funding to cover their transfers. 

Based on findings from our other guaranteed income programs, we believe five years of reliable income will provide households a chance to meet their basic needs, stabilize their finances, and invest in income-generating projects. After that time, we connect donors to more recipients living below the extreme poverty line. 

In order to directly map your donation to a specific person’s transfer, we ask that you donate monthly. If you want to make a one-time donation, you can support recipients across our programs here. For further questions, email us at info@givedirectly.org.

You can end your recurring monthly donation any time here or by emailing info@givedirectly.org. The households you were donating to will still receive transfers through the end of their 5 years through alternative funding. 

Thank you for testing this product and thank you for asking! Each issue you find helps us iterate and build a better donor experience. You can report issues here or email us at beta@givedirectly.org.