Your gift creates dignity for women

Caroline Teti is GiveDirectly’s Director of Safeguarding and Recipient Advocacy. Listen to Caroline narrate her letter: Hello — 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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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Give more money directly to end extreme poverty

Summary Tuesday marks the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, a U.N. observance to rally support for their number one goal and a good chance to take stock of where that goal stands.1 Poverty can mean many things, but extreme poverty has a specific definition: $2.15 per day. This line, set by the World […]

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Cash transfers should be the default, not just the benchmark

Cash transfers are one of the most rigorously studied anti-poverty interventions to date and the evidence that they work is overwhelming. You’ve likely seen years’ worth of studies covering the impact of cash on everything from maternal and child mortality to new business creation to violence reduction. The unprecedented scale-up of government cash responses to the COVID-19 pandemic provided even more evidence of its usefulness […]

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Why we’ve failed to end extreme poverty

As leaders gather this week for the UN General Assembly, they face the most profound failure. The world promised to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030: the UN’s number one goal for a decade and the focus of billions in spending. But we will miss the target by a huge margin. This shouldn’t have happened, and we can do […]

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Cash transfers help more than the individual

The June 14 Washington Post essay by Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Varga, “The problem with universal basic income programs,” mischaracterized the impact and intention of direct cash transfers, arguing they “forestall systemic or structural changes.” The authors employed a causal fallacy in claiming the spread of cash programs such as universal basic income are […]

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