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 […]
Blog
Candid thoughts from staff, donors, and recipients on our work and the broader movement towards cash transfers.
Operations
More people in poverty get cash when we work with governments
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 with […]
Opinions
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 […]
Donation Info
Where does the money go when you click “donate”?
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 […]
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 […]