Meet Sithembile Nyondo, who works in the GiveDirectly call center in Malawi fielding hotline calls from recipients. Every successful customer-facing company has mechanisms for ensuring quality service. We think recipients of aid deserve the same and have designed our call center processes accordingly.
Blog
Candid thoughts from staff, donors, and recipients on our work and the broader movement towards cash transfers.
Recipients
A photo update from 5 families receiving a basic income
Photos of recipients in our Universal Basic Income Program highlight the diversity of investment decisions families make when receiving cash transfers.
Recipients
In 9 minutes, meet everyone in this Liberian village
All 7 households in the Liberian village of Matay Ta have received a GiveDirectly transfer of USD $750. Even in this tiny village, spending choices vary widely.
Research
What’s the best way to help the people who supply the things we buy every day?
Our latest research in 4 sentences: Over the course of 3 payments in 4 months, GiveDirectly delivered $1,000 to 3,415 households in coffee growing communities. One year later, we surveyed them to measure their economic well-being and coffee production. Recipients of the cash consumed more, earned more, had more assets, and greater food security. Also, coffee […]
Operations
How facial identification technology could help our field ops
We’re not interested in tech for the sake of tech. So, there were plenty of skeptics on the team when the possibility of integrating facial identification into our operations came up. Good for iPhones? Yes. Necessary for enrolling recipients in our program? Not obvious. The jury is still out on whether we’ll pursue it at […]
Operations
Solving the last mile payment challenge in Liberia
Think of the longest ATM line you’ve seen in the US…and multiply it by 80. On the World Bank index of ATMs per 100,000 people, Liberia comes in at fewer than 2 (by comparison, the US has 174). Not surprisingly, it’s the kind of place where delivering cash as an aid intervention is often deemed […]
Operations
Getting our bearings in Malawi
How big are villages in Malawi? The answer, our team has been learning, is not entirely straightforward. But it matters, for two key reasons: First, the randomized control trial we are running in partnership with USAID requires us to achieve a certain sample size (i.e. number of villages), within a budget constraint. If villages are […]
Opinions
Reflections from a trip to Kenya
One of our donors recently spent five days with our team in Kenya and shared his reflections. We found them thoughtful, candid, and insightful, and asked to republish them here. — Carlos Dominguez Context note: I work at a financial firm in NYC. This firm has an “employee philanthropy bulletin board” where people discuss their […]
Research
4 years in the making: first cash benchmarking results released
Today we can finally share with you something we’ve been hard at work on for over 4 years: the results from our first experimental benchmarking study, a unique collaboration with USAID, Google.org, and academic and implementing partners set in Rwanda. The animating idea behind this project is incredibly simple: if we’re serious about helping other […]
Operations
Large, unconditional cash to refugees: phase 1, complete!
If you’re interested in supporting our work with refugees, you can do so here. If you’re a long-term refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo now living in Uganda, what is your biggest priority? It’s possible you have a skill-set that you could use to start a business but lack the capital. You might need […]
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