GiveDirectly’s cash transfer programming is quite a bit more diverse today than it was when we first started accepting donations, way back in 2011. In those days, we had a single program design: deliver $1,000 to households in rural Kenya living in poverty. Today we have programs that look similar to that, but we also […]
Blog
Candid thoughts from staff, donors, and recipients on our work and the broader movement towards cash transfers.
Opinions
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 […]
Operations
Improving our ability to give cash after the next global emergency
GiveDirectly helps people escape poverty through cash transfers. People living in poverty or close to poverty are disproportionately affected by crisis, and it’s estimated that two thirds of people living in extreme poverty will be living in fragile and conflict-affected situations by 2030.1 A well-timed cash transfer can help people affected by crises meet their […]
Operations
Our experiments to raise more money for people in poverty
If you’re reading this, you probably already know giving cash directly to someone in poverty works, and are donating based on the research and evidence. You might also believe that you decide where to give based solely on a nonprofit’s mission or effectiveness. However, most of us can be nudged to give based on less-than-logical […]
Operations
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
Research
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 […]
Opinions
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 […]
Opinions
Give more money directly to end extreme poverty
Summary Tuesday marks the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, a U.N. observance to rally support for their number one goal and a good chance to take stock of where that goal stands.1 Poverty can mean many things, but extreme poverty has a specific definition: $2.15 per day. This line, set by the World […]
Opinions
Cash transfers should be the default, not just the benchmark
Cash transfers are one of the most rigorously studied anti-poverty interventions to date and the evidence that they work is overwhelming. You’ve likely seen years’ worth of studies covering the impact of cash on everything from maternal and child mortality to new business creation to violence reduction. The unprecedented scale-up of government cash responses to the COVID-19 pandemic provided even more evidence of its usefulness […]
Opinions
Why we’ve failed to end extreme poverty
As leaders gather this week for the UN General Assembly, they face the most profound failure. The world promised to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030: the UN’s number one goal for a decade and the focus of billions in spending. But we will miss the target by a huge margin. This shouldn’t have happened, and we can do […]