Yesterday, leading charity evaluator GiveWell announced they’re committing more money than ever to effective causes, which we commend. This generosity reflects great news: the world is wealthier than ever before. However, they also decided not to distribute $110M this year because they don’t believe they can find good enough ways to use it now. They […]
Blog
Candid thoughts from staff, donors, and recipients on our work and the broader movement towards cash transfers.
Recipients
We’ve reached 1 million households in poverty and counting
We sent a cash transfer to our 1 millionth household this fall. In 2011, our first year operating, we paid… 99. See the growth in real time: The very first GiveDirectly payment ever Below is GiveDirectly’s co-founder Rohit Wanchoo making our very first test payment ever. Before we were instantly enrolling and paying tens of thousands people at […]
Recipients
The story of Eunice and 144 more in the Kibera program
Eunice lives in the Kibera slums of Nairobi, Kenya and was one of 494 people who received ~$1,125 between November 2020 and June 2021 as part of a GiveDirectly COVID-19 relief program focused on entrepreneurs. This program, funded by Google.org, provided women with cash transfers plus elective budgeting and entrepreneurial training from SHOFCO, a local […]
Recipients
Working in the U.S. helped us get more money to international recipients
Our U.S. COVID19 response was based on a bet In April 2020, we launched Project 100, a U.S. COVID-19 response, in partnership with Propel and Stand for Children. To date, the program has delivered one-time $1,000 payments to over 178K Americans living in poverty, with the most recent round going out last week. For the […]
The Future of Cash
Study: AI targeting helped reach more of the poorest people in Togo
This week researchers with Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) and the Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) published a working paper with the results of a first-of-its-kind contactless direct payments program. The program, which was led by the Government of Togo and supported by the research team and GiveDirectly, showed the machine learning targeting outperformed […]
The Future of Cash
Refugees deserve autonomy. Cash can provide it.
The global refugee crisis may seem intractable, but there are promising, tested interventions to help those displaced. Lump sum cash transfers can provide more than just temporary relief. Our programs suggest direct cash is a scalable response that can change the future for millions of protracted refugees. The solutions to date haven’t scaled, and we […]
The Future of Cash
Innovations in Togo and the future of cash distribution
MobileAid can change how social protections are delivered worldwide. Our model in Togo reveals its strengths and weaknesses.
Operations
GiveDirectly and Segovia
4/06/2021 | Segovia merger and relationship with GiveDirectly Segovia is a financial technology company co-founded in 2014 by two members of GiveDirectly’s board, which today is owned and operated by Crown Agents Bank (CAB). GiveDirectly uses CAB to issue payments via mobile money networks. A summary of the current relationship between the two organizations can […]
Research
What we’ve learned by comparing cash to job training
How does spending funds on training young people compare to handing them the cash instead? Today we released the initial study results.
Research
How does a basic income affect recipients during COVID-19?
Initial results from our basic income experiment were released today. In the working paper’s abstract, researchers Abhijit Banerjee, Michael Faye, the late Alan Krueger, Paul Niehaus, and Tavneet Suri wrote: “We examine some effects of Universal Basic Income (UBI) during the COVID-19 pandemic using a large-scale experiment in rural Kenya. Transfers significantly improved well-being on […]