John Cena warns us against giving cash with conditions

A recent Amazon movie includes a scene about cash transfers, which tells an important truth about conditioning cash. “GiveGreen chooses to offer unconditional cash transfers for two reasons. First, empowering poor people to make their own choices – that advances their core value of respect. Second, imposing conditions requires expensive monitoring & enforcement structures that […]

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More people in poverty get cash when we work with governments

Summary Partnering with government increases the impact of your donation GiveDirectly’s role as a non-profit is to innovate in how cash aid is delivered and study the impact. National governments are central to alleviating poverty in their countries, and any effective non-profit should be working in concert with them.  GiveDirectly has launched our largest collaborations […]

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Your gift creates dignity for women

Caroline Teti is GiveDirectly’s Director of Safeguarding and Recipient Advocacy. Listen to Caroline narrate her letter: As a woman born in the rural villages of western Kenya, I watched mothers toiling to make life livable for their children, forgoing the basics to give us access to the little they could. It was not uncommon for […]

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A Global Cash-Transfer Fund Could End Extreme Poverty

Cash transfers offer a transformative solution to multidimensional poverty, by enhancing dozens of outcomes simultaneously. They have already proven effective, adaptable, and replicable, and now they are becoming more attainable every year with growing mobile coverage and improved digital infrastructure. LOMÉ – For decades, the international community has grappled with the challenge of ending extreme […]

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Tech improvements we made in 2023

We think of GiveDirectly as the pipes that deliver your money to people living in poverty. Sharing some updates (big & small) we made to those pipes this year: Improved payments Simplified operations Tightened fraud prevention Made donating easier Improved org-wide analytics  General systems updates

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Early findings from the world’s largest UBI study

Summary of findings 2 years in: Here’s a 3 minute audio summary of the findings from NPR: To learn about the most effective ways of delivering cash aid, GiveDirectly worked with a team of researchers to compare three ways of giving out funds.1 About 200 Kenyan villages were assigned to one of three groups and […]

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From California to Kenya: trust people with cash

The following is a guest post from Michael Tubbs, the founder of Mayors for a Guaranteed Income and the former Mayor of Stockton, about his recent visit to GiveDirectly cash aid programs in Kenya. I recently had the privilege of traveling to Kenya with GiveDirectly to see firsthand some of the great work they are […]

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