Refusals in Kenya

In general, an overwhelming majority of eligible recipients opt to receive cash transfers from GiveDirectly. In Siaya, where GiveDirectly Kenya has operated from 2011 to the beginning of 2016, over 95% of recipients who are given the opportunity to be a part of the program accept it. In Uganda and Rwanda more than 96% of […]

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Why and how we invest

We have a strong incentive and desire to transfer the majority of the funds we receive to our recipients as quickly as possible. GiveDirectly is a service – donors use GiveDirectly to transfer funds to the extreme poor – and our donors expect that service to be efficient and timely. And beyond that, transfer speed […]

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How do we tell who is poor?

Every organization that aims to improve the lives of others has to confront some basic questions: Who should we help with our limited resources? How should we find the people we’d like to help? And how should we make sure that the people we’re actually helping meet the criteria we’ve established? Surprisingly, this isn’t something […]

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Biometrics in Uganda

How do you verify individuals’ identities in a country where identification documentation is not prevalent and personal data is non-existent? In fact, this is a massive problem faced by anti-poverty programs worldwide. Organizations from national governments to NGOs struggle with how to accurately and safely identify their beneficiaries, especially in regions that lack reliable infrastructure […]

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Timing the transfer

Mitch Riley, one of GiveDirectly’s field directors, explains the logic that goes into answering the question: “why do we use the transfer timing that we do?” The decision on how to break up the approximately $1000 payment per recipient is more complicated than it might seem. We have to take into account a range of […]

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Here we come, Homa Bay

We are very pleased to announce that GiveDirectly is moving its operations in Kenya from Siaya County, north of Kisumu, to Homa Bay County to the south. In Kenya, the counties of Siaya and Homa Bay are relatively close to each other and to our main office in Kisumu. The move represents GiveDirectly’s expanding potential […]

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A wet and muddy situation in the field

Emmanuel, a field officer from Uganda, reflects on a wet and muddy situation in the field. Not every organization can put “how to navigate potentially hippo-infested swamps” on their weekly problem-solving agenda. Field officers traverse the swamp. The enrolment process for our most recent campaign in Uganda began in March – the dry season – […]

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Targeting innovation in Kenya

Anti-poverty programs must often start with a rather obvious step: finding poor people. This may seem like a simple exercise, particularly in countries with high poverty rates. However, consider the potential pitfalls of some common approaches: a simple asset test (questions like “do you have a bicycle? A cow? A radio?”) may be easy to […]

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Announcement: Moving to our third district in Kenya

GiveDirectly is crossing an important milestone: after over two years working in Siaya district, we’re moving our enrollment teams to our third district in Kenya – Ugunja. This is an exciting moment for GiveDirectly because it’s a sign of the scale we’ve reached: we’ve now been to all the villages in a district that our […]

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Fighting fraud in Uganda

We recently dealt with our worst fraud case to date, with 2% of a round of transfers in Uganda diverted. This incident brought to light vulnerabilities which we have since addressed, and we don’t expect changes in performance going forward. We are making it a point to write openly about this case, however, because nonprofits […]

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