We’ve focused on improving government relations, refining our ability to respond to crises, and expanding to new continents.

139,968
recipients paid
12
countries reached
$72.9M+
delivered
9
new programs implemented

Our Partners

Program Spotlights

Latifa and son in Rwanda

Scaling Transfers for Extreme Poverty (STEP)

We’ve started delivering payments in our two largest programs to date. Across both Rwanda and Malawi, STEP (Scaling Transfers for Extreme Poverty) is a critical program in our goal of lifting everyone in a single country out of poverty.

Outcomes

Our aim with this program is to demonstrate that cash works at the largest scale. If we can prove cash’s effects can be sustained at the national level, we think the largest institutional funders will be persuaded to allocate more of their budgets to effective cash programming.

Transfer Size

$550

Households Reached
  • Rwanda: 12,196 enrolled
  • Malawi: 10,490 enrolled
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Aginada in Mozambique

International Crisis Response

As a growing number of those experiencing poverty become concentrated in humanitarian contexts, we’ve invested in our ability to respond to crises around the world rapidly.

  • Turkey: we reached Syrian refugee micro-entrepreneurs and low-income workers in the hardest-hit regions of Turkey (Hatay, Adana, Gaziantep, Sanliurfa) to help them recover from the devastating earthquakes.
  • Morocco: within days of the earthquake striking, we launched a campaign to help families living in the highest levels of poverty that were affected by the devastation.
  • Mozambique: the country experienced a record-breaking cyclone in 2023. With Google Research and the government of Mozambique, we launched a pilot to use AI-driven flood forecasting to remotely enroll recipients and send payments three days before flooding.
Outcomes

We’ll use the learnings from these responses to inform future program designs. Also, with climate risk affecting more and more of the extreme poor, these models could serve as templates for the rest of the aid sector to build on, with the goal of reaching some of the world’s most vulnerable populations.

Transfer Sizes
  • Turkey: ~$621
  • Morocco: ~$200
  • Mozambique: $225
Households Reached
  • Turkey: 1,107
  • Morocco: pre-enrollment
  • Mozambique: 4,183
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Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha with Flint resident Isabella

Tailored Programs

In Flint, Michigan, where nearly 70% of children live below the poverty line, we’re sending cash to every expectant mother starting in January 2024. We’ll deliver each mother a one-time lump sum, followed by 12 monthly payments during their infant’s first year of life.

Outcomes

A significant body of evidence shows that cash transfers to moms improve the health of both mother and child. Multiple studies have found positive impacts of cash and cash-like interventions on birth weight, preterm births, breastfeeding, parental mental health outcomes, and food security. Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan will support evaluation and policy efforts, with the goal of ultimately influencing local and national governments to adopt more cash-based assistance. 

Transfer Size

$1,500 upon enrollment; $500 monthly payments

Households Reached

~1,200 in 2024

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Mobile money agent registering a SIM for a recipient

Combating Fraud in DRC

Earlier this year, we identified significant fraud in one of our programs in the DRC. While our investigation is ongoing, we currently calculate around $900,000 was stolen from our program in South Kivu Province over 6 months. This means, across the org, ~1.1% of the $146M we delivered last year was lost to fraud, compared to 0.23% in 2021. This fraud was only possible because of a specific change we made to our payment process to work in this remote, insecure region of the DRC.

Outcomes

We have taken immediate steps to prevent this type of fraud from happening again and are taking disciplinary and legal action against those involved. This includes further firewalling different departments to prevent collusion, implementing automated data checks org-wide that would allow us to detect such fraud more rapidly, and eliminating the SIM registration exception we made unless we make additional controls. 

We also want the sector to learn from our mistakes. We will share the findings from our investigation with other organizations working in the D.R.C. to help them avoid similar failure points.

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Your Impact in the News

Baraza in Kilifi, Kenya