Tech improvements we made in 2023

We think of GiveDirectly as the pipes that deliver your money to people living in poverty. Sharing some updates (big & small) we made to those pipes this year:

Improved payments

• 📲 Gave recipients in Malawi, Rwanda, & Uganda more choice in which telecom they receive payments on by integrating with Onafriq & PawaPay
• ⏲️ Reduced recipient anxiety over what time cash will arrive by improving payment timing accuracy from within 1hr to 15mins
• ⛈️ Tested forecast-triggered payments with Google Research to send cash within a day of flood alerts in Mozambique
• 💸 Paid Bangladeshi recipients as quickly as 3 days after registration by using machine learning analysis with CEGA to determine eligibility

Simplified operations

• 📶 Empowered field managers to digitally assign workload to staff even while in remote areas with minimal cell service through self-serve permissions
• 📋 Saved hours of staff time by streamlining dashboards to survey recipients and automating survey permissions
• ✅ Cut the time it takes to code our eligibility checks for new programs from 2 months to 1 week

Tightened fraud prevention

• ⏩ Reduced the window of opportunity for fraud attempts by sending payments to recipients as quickly as one week after they’re registered
• 🔐 Reduced risk of fraud, human errors, and workload by fully automating funds-handling approval system and updating our process deduplication payment records
• 🚩 Launched automated investigation flags for potential signs of internal fraud in our operations data, and sped up those investigations through automated & visualized audit logs

Made donating easier

• 🤳 Improved mobile phone donations by adding Apple Pay & Google Pay
• 🏦 Made low-fee bank transfers easier by adding an ACH donation option
• 💳 Embedded donation checkout widget into our homepage for one-step gifts

Improved org-wide analytics 

• 📊 Improved data-driven decision making by hiring 3 data scientists/engineers and making performance data more accessible org-wide
• 👨‍👩‍👧 Analyzed historic recipient expenditure data to better understand recipient needs and trends in spending behavior
• 📈 Launched dashboard to better visualize our efficiency across time, countries, and programs

General systems updates

• 💻 Onboarded AWS Control Tower to alert and enforce best practices across all cloud infrastructure
• ⚙️ Fully automated testing & deployment of software (CI/CD) for faster & safer software releases
• 🛡️ Better protected recipient data by rolling out mobile device management across all work phones