It has begun! As I write, field officers in Bomet County, Kenya are beginning to enroll the first (post-pilot) households into the largest basic income initiative in history.The past 19 months since we announced our plans to test UBI have been remarkable. The debate over basic income continues to rage, from skeptics who call it […]
Blog - Operations
Candid thoughts from staff, donors, and recipients on our work and the broader movement towards cash transfers.
Operations
An update on fraud management in Uganda
Recently, we finished investigating and resolving a meaningful case of staff fraud in Uganda, and are sharing the results and lessons publicly. As in previous cases, we want to set a norm that charities report this stuff. Fraud is a fact of life in any charitable work and needs to be discussed openly, not kept […]
Operations
Working after Harvey: nuts and bolts
We recently kicked off an experimental project in and around Houston to let folks give directly to people affected by Harvey. (See here for more on why, exactly.) This is a good new challenge for our team: we know we can get money to remote villages in the middle of Ugandan swamps, but can we […]
Operations
What are we learning from Texas?
Disaster response is, sadly, often a disaster. We give hundreds of millions of dollars to big organizations with great name recognition but poor track records executing. Sometimes we collect truckloads of random stuff and ship it ourselves, hoping that it happens to be what people need. (Guess how that story ends.) If ever there was […]
Operations
GiveDirectly for Harvey recovery
Like many of you, we’ve seen the flooding and devastation created by Hurricane Harvey, and we’ve wished for a way to help those families directly. Unfortunately, there’s still no way for the public to send money directly to those families in need. So when some folks from our team said they wanted to head to […]
Operations
Update on UBI and the Kenyan election
Folks, We’ve decided to postpone the launch of our basic income initiative in Kenya until after the new election. Earlier this month Kenya’s Supreme Court voted to nullify the August 8th presidential election results. Presidential candidate Ralia Odinga challenged sitting president Uhuru Kenyatta’s 54% win and appealed to the Supreme Court that the election had […]
Operations
Improving our call center
Our call center team is a critical part of GiveDirectly’s work in Kenya – it includes about 20 staff, who are based in our main office in Nairobi and handle a range of recipient-facing issues. They contact recipients to confirm that transfers are received successfully and they capture recipient responses for GDLive. The call center […]
Operations, Research
Cash to coffee farmers in eastern Uganda
Historically, when an aid organization or government wants to help coffee farmers improve their lives, they give in-kind agricultural interventions, such as seedlings and training. But what if instead of giving goods and services, we just gave farmers cash? Catherine has received transfers as part of BSZ’s experiment in Uganda. You can follow her story, […]
Operations, Research
Unconditional cash transfers and intrahousehold conflict: A pilot study in Kenya
Intimate partner violence is a significant challenge in Kenya, as in other developing countries. Nearly 40% of ever-married Kenyan women report physical abuse by a spouse (KNBS and ICF Macro 2010), and in a separate survey, almost 90% report some form of emotionally abusive treatment (Haushofer and Shapiro 2016). Women who are subject to physical […]
Operations
On accepting fundraising donations
Donors have been asking us why they can’t direct online donations to pay for fundraising, which could potentially generate tremendous leverage for them (details below). It’s a fair question. Here’s how we think about it. For context, we’re not happy with the status quo in which donors typically have very little information about how their […]