GiveDirectly

A friend sent me Rory Stewart's TED talk about extreme poverty and I'll be honest: I put off watching it. I figured it was going to be "good for me," like a plate of asparagus. Nope, nope -- totally fascinating. And wonderfully blunt too! Here's Stewart on his experience, as the head of a $20 billion development organization, in visiting projects in the field: "What I saw was deeply depressing. When you go out on the ground, these projects are far worse than you could possibly imagine." The solution? Cash transfers. Let's remember: What people suffering from extreme poverty lack is, um, money. So why do we insist on doling out advice and training and buildings and technology -- designed and distributed by developed-world employees who make 100 or 1000x the wages of the people they're serving?? (And before someone dusts off the old saw about 'teaching a man to fish,' make sure to stick around for Stewart's dismantling of that particular analogy...) Can't recommend the talk highly enough! The leader in effective cash transfers, GiveDirectly, is the most exciting nonprofit in the world. https://lnkd.in/g3v5HGGW

"We have a moral imperative to use every dollar entrusted to us as wisely and impactfully as possible," USAID's Deputy Administrator, Isobel Coleman while launching a position paper on the power of unconditional cash transfers to address poverty last week as part of the agency’s commitment to using cost-effectiveness analysis to drive funding decisions. This caps a long-building shift in how USAID leverages their $30B a year budget to help end extreme poverty. From first running a cash benchmarking study in 2015 to now — for the first time — formally endorsing direct monetary transfers as a core element of its development toolkit. This is a significant step forward in empowering individuals, households, and communities to make their own financial decisions, which promotes dignity and respect while driving local economic growth. Coleman added, “More than 100 impact evaluations across 34 countries show that direct monetary transfers consistently drive strong impacts on food security, nutrition, and resilience; they can help workers earn higher income, they can help children attend school and set them up for a brighter future.” What does the USAID paper on Direct Monetary Transfers argue? 📜 Cash Has Evidence-Based Results: The paper highlights over 100 randomized evaluations — including multiple GiveDirectly studies — proving the long-term positive impacts of cash transfers on food security, health, well-being, and incomes years after transfers end. 📈 Cash is Cost-Effective and Efficient: Direct cash helps stretch budgets further, delivering impactful, rapid, and transparent assistance. It has a multiplier effect, boosting local economies far beyond the direct recipients. 💰Cash Helps Address Poverty, Not Just Disasters: USAID’s stance moves cash transfers into broader development work (helping communities out of poverty), an evolution from when cash was mostly used for emergency and humanitarian relief. GiveDirectly has long advocated for the power of direct cash to respect people's agency and achieve measurable results. We are ready to strengthen our partnership with USAID and other donors to maximize the impact of every dollar of aid and accelerate the use of cash to end extreme poverty. 🎥 Watch the full event: Improving the Impact per Dollar of USAID Programming: https://lnkd.in/eb2aHpUK  📗Read USAID’s Position Paper on Direct Monetary Transfers for Development Outcomes: https://lnkd.in/ggeAqYjd  📘Read USAID’s Position Paper on Cost-Effectiveness, which was released at the same time time and is a model for how governments can plan to spend existing money better: https://lnkd.in/grieqiFr

Send your cash, not your stuff! https://lnkd.in/eQdxqUnT You can give money directly to low-income families impacted by Hurricanes Helene & Milton, reaching them quickly & fully remotely, empowering them spend on what they need most. GiveDirectly is delivering emergency cash to low-income families in Florida & North Carolina's hardest-hit areas, helping them cover immediate needs like: 🚰Essentials: food, water, generators, medicine, diapers 🏨Bills: phone, rent or hotels, utilities 🔨Repairs: homes or cars Here’s how we get your cash to survivors: 🛰️ID the highest-need communities using storm damage imagery and poverty data. 📲Enroll & pay families through food stamps benefits app Propel, Inc in the next week or so. 💸Cash hits their accounts just hours after enrolling, much faster than conventional aid. Cash aid allows disaster survivors to meet their own needs rather than having others guess for them — which is why people impacted by a crisis say they prefer cash relief over donated goods. Your donations will help thousands of families meet their own urgent needs and rebuild their lives. Give today: https://lnkd.in/eQdxqUnT

Send your cash, not your stuff! You can give money directly to low-income families impacted by Hurricanes Helene & Milton, reaching them quickly & fully remotely, empowering them spend on what they need most: https://lnkd.in/eQdxqUnT GiveDirectly is delivering emergency cash to low-income families in Florida & North Carolina's hardest-hit areas, helping them cover immediate needs like: 🚰Essentials: food, water, generators, medicine, diapers 🏨Bills: phone, rent or hotels, utilities 🔨Repairs: homes or cars Here’s how we get your cash to survivors: 🛰️ID the highest-need communities using storm damage imagery and poverty data. 📲Enroll & pay families through food stamps benefits app Propel, Inc in the next 1-2 weeks. 💸Cash hits their accounts just hours after enrolling, much faster than conventional aid. Cash aid allows disaster survivors to meet their own needs rather than having others guess for them — which is why people impacted by a crisis say they prefer cash relief over donated goods. Your donations will help thousands of families meet their own urgent needs and rebuild their lives. Haven’t heard of GiveDirectly before? Here’s why you can trust us: 🌀We’ve delivered cash to thousands of families impacted by Hurricanes Ian & Fiona (2022), Dorian (2019), and Harvey (2017).  🤝We’ve run over a dozen emergency relief programs across the world with partners including Google and USAID. 🏅Fast Company named GiveDirectly in their “50 Most Innovative Companies” for our 2022 hurricane response: https://lnkd.in/erapRmgG

From Project Management Institute: "The GiveDirectly team wanted to observe the outcome of giving money to the world’s poor without assessing a recipient’s 'worthiness' or placing conditions on how it was used... It didn’t take long for studies about its work to substantiate what they suspected — unconditional cash transfers work. People used the money wisely. Many invested the funds in entrepreneurial projects that could boost their income. But even a robust body of research didn’t fully help GiveDirectly address resistance to the model. 'There have been a lot of studies of cash transfers that prove their viability, but when you take these studies to government, they will say, ‘Yes, great, but that’s in Kenya. The local context is different,’' says Nkurunziza Richard, MBA, GiveDirectly’s senior manager of Rwanda programs. The nonprofit decided to launch an even more audacious project in 2023, taking the unconditional cash transfer idea from the village-level to a larger scale. The purpose of the project, says Nkurunziza, is to swiftly and effectively lift Rwandan families out of extreme poverty. The unconditional cash transfer project in Rwanda centered recipients, extending them the trust and dignity to best choose how to improve their lives with the cash. GiveDirectly’s Rwanda team worked closely with local and national governments and village leaders to roll out the program in line with their development goals. 'The only condition [to receiving the cash] is that you fall below the poverty line,' Nkurunziza explains. 'We opt for saturation, covering an entire village, so we aren’t making decisions about the [relative worth] of one family or household or another.' His colleague, Nathalie Bintu, GiveDirectly’s external relations lead, adds that one year into the project, GiveDirectly is seeing a big pay-off. 'We’ve already started observing outcomes: improved health, massive drops in food insecurity, and a general ability for recipients to meet basic needs,' she says. Nkurunziza agrees, 'Cash transfers impact so many other areas: child mortality, gender equity. Cash transfers are respectful. They provide agency. They are unconditional. And they’ve been proven to work.' Bintu concludes that 'if we can do this at the national level successfully, we can do this in other countries.'" More from our recognition by Project Management Institute at https://lnkd.in/eJrFD5NM More on our work in Rwanda at GiveDirectly.org/rwanda

CALP Network and cash world! USAID is launching 2 position papers super relevant to you, one on Cost-Effectiveness, and another on Direct Monetary Transfers (often referred to as cash transfers) this Thursday at Center for Global Development In a world with tremendous need, Cost-Effectiveness helps us understand tradeoffs in program choice, design and implementation, enabling development actors to achieve the greatest impact possible with available resources. The paper on Direct Monetary Transfers paper builds on the great work by humanitarian actors that have been using it at scale (USAID's BHA allocated >$1.5B in emergency cash and voucher assistance in FY 2023), and expands on this work to discuss how transfers can be used to impact development outcomes (spoiler-- it's often very cost-effective and can impact outcomes from household resilience to microenterprise growth). Come (in person or virtually!) to learn about USAID's increased attention on these topics Register here: https://lnkd.in/efAh66rq Rory Crew Gabriele Erba Zehra Rizvi Lynn Y. Holly Welcome Radice Paula Gil Baizan Cheryl Harrison Ugo Gentilini Jean-Martin Bauer Clément Rouquette Elizabeth Tromans Kenn Crossley

We think the way to save lives is more medicine and doctors, but more money also helps. Dozens of research studies across Africa show giving cash directly can… 🥘Improve nutrition 🏥Reduce illness  🤰🏾Increase access to prenatal care  👶🏾Reduce child mortality To see how it works, watch how a village in Malawi used their $550 from GiveDirectly to invest in better nutrition, clean water, and better access to healthcare. Learn more about this life-changing impact at GiveDirectly.org.

Worried people in poverty blow cash aid on booze? Spoiler: They're too busy blowing it on food, medicine, & education. GiveDirectly.org ⬇️ 📚 Dozens of research studies show giving people in poverty cash instance does not increase spending on 'temptation goods' like alcohol and tobacco. Source: https://lnkd.in/eRMwBgsU David Evans & Anna Popova for The World Bank 🍛After receiving GiveDirectly cash, Kenyan families spent more on food, medicine, and education. Source: https://lnkd.in/eWye4mbF Johannes Haushofer & Jeremy Shapiro for Princeton University 🛖Another study found communities that received cash saw fewer people drinking daily and were less likely to say drinking as a problem in their village. Source: https://lnkd.in/eM6DVvGN Tavneet Suri et al for Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) 📋 Worried cash recipients tell researchers they aren't drinking to keep them happy? Here's how studies are designed to avoid that: https://lnkd.in/eRMwBgsU Cartoon by David Ostow, licensed from CartoonStock.com

What works better: giving someone in poverty a monthly basic income or a single large lump sum? Evidence shows #UBI isn't always the best way to deliver cash aid. For more, RSVP for Thursday's webinar with socialprotection.org: https://lnkd.in/e99tfWVc Edit: watch the full presentation here: https://lnkd.in/eBCeN2KJ 💻💰 'Trusting People with a Large Cash Payment - Exploring evidence on cash lump sums vs flow payments' on Thursday September 26th is a discussion on the evidence base around lumpsum payments for poverty reduction versus regular social assistance payments and the initial findings from the world’s longest Universal Basic Income (UBI) study #SPorgWebinar 👥 ➕ Meet the participants and learn more about the webinar: https://lnkd.in/e4tZEKWt Miriam Laker-Oketta Sarah Hague Dalitso Kalimba Isabelle Pelly #SocialProtection #SocialJustice #EconomicEmpowerment

GiveDirectly will be advocating for cash for climate justice and cash for women’s empowerment at the United Nations General Assembly (#UNGA) next week ⬇️ 🤝Interested in a 1:1 meeting? Reach out to Caroline Teti, Isabelle Pelly, & Yolande Wright who will be there representing us. 🎤 On Thursday Sept. 26th, they're part of Devex’s The Future Can’t Wait summit (also streaming online): https://lnkd.in/eFtpvkah 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇲🇼They’ll also be forwarding the case for cash for climate loss & damage at a closed-door event with The Scottish Government and the Government of Malawi (https://lnkd.in/efaWrXux), then joining the Goal House's Women in Philanthropy session (goalshouse.com/houses/unga)