For families fleeing conflict or crisis, the world is short on solutions. In the past decade, relief organizations have been forced to make steep cuts to rations provided due to budget constraints, while wealthy countries have welcomed fewer than 1% of refugees. For the 33M refugees unable to return home, building a new life in […]
Candid thoughts from staff, donors, and recipients on our work and the broader movement towards cash transfers.
Operations, Recipients
The power of a mobile phone & mobile money
Mobile money is a financial technology that allows people to store, send, and receive money using basic mobile phones through text messages—no internet connection or traditional bank required. Originally developed in Kenya in 2007 with M-PESA, mobile money has grown to serve over 640 million people worldwide, with more than half of all accounts located […]
Operations
Fraud in D.R.C. – our apology and response
Update as of September 24, 2024: Update as of November 16, 2023: since the original post below, we’ve completed our investigation and are sharing these updates: Summary GiveDirectly has delivered cash transfers to some of the poorest households across sub-Saharan Africa for over a decade. Cash aid sent directly to recipients’ mobile money accounts is […]
Operations
How AI helped 6x our disaster response speed
For nearly two weeks after Hurricane Ian hit Ft. Myers, Florida, Shannon P. went without power. Shannon relies on food stamps to make ends meet and is dependent on insulin, which must be refrigerated. To power her fridge, she had to purchase a generator and a constant supply of gas to run it, costing hundreds […]
Recipients, Research
Evidence on how cash transfers empower women in poverty
Donations to GiveDirectly put power in the hands of recipients, 62% of whom are women.1 On International Women’s Day, hear directly from women and girls in poverty in Malawi about the unique ways that direct cash empowers them: This impact is more than anecdotal; research finds that cash aid lets women improve their lives in […]
Opinions, Recipients
Sharing stories of poverty but not ‘poverty porn’
“The sight of a child so starved he’s too weak to cry… it’s enough to make the angels cry,” says Sally Struthers, strolling through a slum in an unidentified south Asian country. These Christian Children’s Fund ads, which ran for two decades, exemplify the ‘poverty porn’ trope still employed by many charities––a practice so ubiquitous […]
Press
More climate funding should go directly to people in poverty
Last month, negotiators at the U.N.’s COP27 secured agreement from wealthier countries to create a fund to help low-income, vulnerable countries cope with climate disasters. This builds on the $100B per year pledged by wealthier countries for a similar purpose, a financial acknowledgment that those living in the poorest nations bear the brunt of but […]
Operations
A new tool to give even more directly
UPDATE: As of August 2023, we have stopped matching donors with participants receiving cash transfers. We began matching donors with recipients receiving transfers to better illustrate the impact of your donation, and we learned a lot from testing this approach. Delivering this experience in a high-quality way required more time from field and technical staff, […]
Operations
Canva partnership tackling extreme poverty in Malawi one year on
Last fall, GiveDirectly and Canva, the visual communication platform, announced a partnership to give money directly to some of the world’s poorest people – a $10 million pilot that is sending a basic income through mobile money payments to people in extreme poverty in Khongoni, Malawi. The pilot, launched this March, will deliver ~$50 per […]
Recipients
Inflation is worst for people in extreme poverty
You’ve likely been impacted by the cost of living crisis: U.S. gas prices spiked this summer and energy prices are still at all-time highs across Europe. While overall inflation in high-income countries is at 6%, in low-income countries it’s at 9%. Consumers in wealthy countries can often switch from higher-quality goods to lower-quality ones, an […]