With the release of GDLive and the holiday giving season approaching, several articles featured GiveDirectly this week. In the Observer, reporter Brady Dale profiled GDLive, including a specific recipient named Besides, from Uganda. On the BBC, co-founder Michael Faye joined a panel to discuss GiveDirectly’s basic income experiment, and Yahoo News profiled GiveDirectly as a particularly efficient and effective way to donate this year.
GIVEDIRECTLY IN THE NEWS AND BLOGS
1. The most efficient way to give to charity
Yahoo News, Ethan Wolff-Mann, November 28, 2016
Give Well has one other organization on its list, which is a little bizarre. It’s called GiveDirectly, and it does exactly what it sounds like: It gives money to those in extreme poverty in places like Kenya and Uganda. After a cash transfer, they themselves decide what they need and buy it. It sounds almost counterintuitive, but in many instances people know what they need better than wealthier people who don’t know them or their needs.
2. GiveDirectly’s No Strings Attached Charity, Now With Unfiltered Feedback
Observer, Brady Dale, November 28, 2016
Besides is a 56 year-old woman living in Uganda who has had a lot of setbacks, according to a testimonial posted on the website of GiveDirectly. The non-profit is organized around making charity as simple as possible by giving poor people money, with no strings attached. When Besides enrolled in GiveDirectly’s program, which gives African people like her about $1,000 in local currency over the course of a few payments, the GiveDirectly field worker who signed her up asked her about her life so far.
3. KENYA: FROM UNCONDITIONAL CASH TRANSFERS TOWARDS UNCONDITIONAL BASIC INCOME, a Randomized Controlled Trial to Come
Basic Income News, Hilde Latour, November 26, 2016
“We started our program in Kenya because they had a very robust mobile money payment system there, and that’s the means by which we transfer cash to poor households”, Bassin says. The primary goal of GiveDirectly is to help demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of cash transfers. The research done so far shows that giving money to poor people works.
4. AidChoice: Give the People Who Pay for Aid a Voice in Spending It
CGD Blog, Owen Barder and Theodore Talbot, November 11, 2016
A competition to attract funding would raise our collective expectations about the quality and quantity of information that aid organisations should provide about what they are doing and how effective they are. GiveDirectly, for example, has a simple proposition: it motivates donations because it is committed to a remarkable degree of transparency about its operations and finances, extending to updating its website with impact evaluations literally as the data come in.
5. Universal Basic Income: Has its Time Come?
BBC World Service In the Balance, Ed Butler w/Michael Faye, November 20, 2016
It is an idea that has been around for hundreds of years – to give everyone in society a regular chunk of money that is enough to guarantee them a minimum survivable standard of living.
CASH TRANSFER NEWS
6. Tanzania’s Conditional Cash Transfer Program Helps Reduce Extreme Poverty
The World Bank, November 18, 2016
In 2012, Beata Masigazwa enrolled in the country’s conditional cash transfer program and began to receive a small amount of money each month to buy proteins, fruits and vegetables for her family. Less than a year later, she had saved enough money from her stipend to buy her own sheep, goats, pigs, ducks and chickens, which she now rears on her homestead in Nkwenda village in Chamwino and sells to her neighbors.
BASIC INCOME
7. German MP proposes ‘free basic income’ for parents
DW, Ben Knight, November 28, 2016
A member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union wants parents in Germany to receive a basic income regardless of their means. But this shouldn’t be confused with universal basic income, she said.
8. Scotland could trial giving each citizen a universal basic income
The Independent, Lucy Pasha-Robinson, November 24, 2016
Scotland could roll out a universal basic income pilot after a trial won huge backing from anti-poverty campaigners. Development of the scheme, due to be tested in Fife, will be discussed on Friday by councillors, civil servants and members of the Scottish Basic Income Network, and would see welfare benefits including child and tax credits replaced with a universal flat-rate payment.