Blog - Opinions

As a way of building connections among our teams in the US and Africa, GiveDirectly has set up regular international one-on-one chats between team members in Uganda, Kenya and the US. Of course a call or online chat isn’t as good as meeting with coworkers in person, but these short conversations are teaching me a […]

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We’re thrilled that GiveWell has listed us as one of their top recommended charities once again this year. It’s not an easy mountain to climb: GiveWell reviews hundreds of organizations in unbelievable depth, and recommends very few – this year, only four. I’m grateful to my teammates here at GiveDirectly, as their strong performance is […]

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Today we’re launching a new website for GiveDirectly—the first major update since www.givedirectly.org went live in 2011. Our main goal in reimagining the site was to create radical transparency into what we do and how well we do it. We’ve invested a lot to integrate cutting-edge technology into our field model so that we have […]

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Many people think that simply giving money directly to the poor is a radical new idea. We’re flattered, but the reality is: it isn’t. Over the last decade, cash transfers have quietly become one of the most widely used poverty-fighting tools in the toolkits of aid agencies and emerging market governments. If the question about […]

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We’ve used mobile payments to deliver cash transfers since launching in Kenya in 2009. But many cash transfer programs around the world – including large-scale programs run by governments – still operate with physical cash, which is often costly, slow, and prone to error and corruption. Increasingly we’re seeing programs shift to mobile and other […]

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“The more cash we give to the poor, and the more evidence we have that it works, the more we have to reconsider everything else we give.”In a new TED talk, Joy Sun, COO-domestic of GiveDirectly, asks us to reconsider how we think about and deliver aid, and provides evidence on the power of unconditional […]

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We asked members of our team who are from or have spent a lot of time in the U.S. a simple question: Do you give cash to the homeless in the US? We were inspired by a blog post in which Chris Blattman asks: “Why do I think it’s a good idea to give cash […]

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For the past year, I served as the Field Director in Kenya and led our team to deliver more than $3 million to poor households. Since transitioning to a New York-based role recently, I’ve been reflecting on how far we’ve come in a year. When I arrived in Kenya, our office was aptly described as […]

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When I first started interning at GiveDirectly earlier this year, I was new to the whole idea of cash transfers. As I’ve explored the topic more on social media, I’ve come to realize there is a growing and very eclectic community of people who are passionate about direct giving for different reasons. Here are some […]

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We treat the privacy of our donors and recipients seriously and do not believe it was affected by the Heartbleed Bug.We confirmed that our hosting provider, Amazon, had patched the bug and then we updated all our certificates and keys. We verified that Stripe, our payments processor, did the same. We do not believe that […]

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