You may have read our recent announcement that operations are afoot in Liberia. We’re excited to announce that we’ll be expanding our program to a fifth country: the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). As with Liberia, we’re learning that for each new launch, some of our standard playbook carries over (e.g. Day 1: figure out […]
Blog -
Candid thoughts from staff, donors, and recipients on our work and the broader movement towards cash transfers.
Operations
Targeting innovation in Kenya
Anti-poverty programs must often start with a rather obvious step: finding poor people. This may seem like a simple exercise, particularly in countries with high poverty rates. However, consider the potential pitfalls of some common approaches: a simple asset test (questions like “do you have a bicycle? A cow? A radio?”) may be easy to […]
Recipients
In their own words: GiveDirectly’s first recipients reflect on the past three years
Last week, I met with six randomly-chosen recipients from the first villages GiveDirectly enrolled in 2012. We gathered in the home of Joshua, one of the recipients, who had used part of his transfer to build a permanent home for his family. We discussed challenges, goals, and the various ways these recipients had invested their […]
Opinions
Cash transfers: not “whether,” but “how”
Many people think that simply giving money directly to the poor is a radical new idea. We’re flattered, but the reality is: it isn’t. Over the last decade, cash transfers have quietly become one of the most widely used poverty-fighting tools in the toolkits of aid agencies and emerging market governments. If the question about […]
Opinions
Two countries, one team
I had the great pleasure of attending our first East Africa staff retreat this past weekend. Eight members of our Kenya team made the six hour trip from Kisumu to Mbale, the hub for our Uganda country operations. Members of our Kenya and Uganda field teams gathered in Mbale, Uganda for last weekend’s GiveDirectly staff […]
Operations
GiveDirectly is in Uganda!
From the beginning, our goal at GiveDirectly has been to build an efficient and scalable platform to deliver cash transfers to poor people around the world. After months of planning and execution, we are very happy to announce that we now have a program up and running in a second country: Uganda! Cash transfer recipients […]
Recipients
A Report from the Field: Following Up with Cash Transfer Recipients
This post comes from Piali Mukhopadhyay, our Chief Operating Officer. As of this spring, Piali and our field team in Kenya have overseen the transfer of over $1 million to more than 1,000 households in Western province. They have also laid the groundwork to transfer $675,000 to an additional 1,500 households over the coming months. […]