We have a strong incentive and desire to transfer the majority of the funds we receive to our recipients as quickly as possible. GiveDirectly is a service – donors use GiveDirectly to transfer funds to the extreme poor – and our donors expect that service to be efficient and timely. And beyond that, transfer speed […]
Blog - Operations
Candid thoughts from staff, donors, and recipients on our work and the broader movement towards cash transfers.
Operations
How do we tell who is poor?
Every organization that aims to improve the lives of others has to confront some basic questions: Who should we help with our limited resources? How should we find the people we’d like to help? And how should we make sure that the people we’re actually helping meet the criteria we’ve established? Surprisingly, this isn’t something […]
Operations
Biometrics in Uganda
How do you verify individuals’ identities in a country where identification documentation is not prevalent and personal data is non-existent? In fact, this is a massive problem faced by anti-poverty programs worldwide. Organizations from national governments to NGOs struggle with how to accurately and safely identify their beneficiaries, especially in regions that lack reliable infrastructure […]
Operations
Timing the transfer
Mitch Riley, one of GiveDirectly’s field directors, explains the logic that goes into answering the question: “why do we use the transfer timing that we do?” The decision on how to break up the approximately $1000 payment per recipient is more complicated than it might seem. We have to take into account a range of […]
Operations
Here we come, Homa Bay
We are very pleased to announce that GiveDirectly is moving its operations in Kenya from Siaya County, north of Kisumu, to Homa Bay County to the south. In Kenya, the counties of Siaya and Homa Bay are relatively close to each other and to our main office in Kisumu. The move represents GiveDirectly’s expanding potential […]
Operations
A wet and muddy situation in the field
Emmanuel, a field officer from Uganda, reflects on a wet and muddy situation in the field. Not every organization can put “how to navigate potentially hippo-infested swamps” on their weekly problem-solving agenda. Field officers traverse the swamp. The enrolment process for our most recent campaign in Uganda began in March – the dry season – […]
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 […]
Operations
Announcement: Moving to our third district in Kenya
GiveDirectly is crossing an important milestone: after over two years working in Siaya district, we’re moving our enrollment teams to our third district in Kenya – Ugunja. This is an exciting moment for GiveDirectly because it’s a sign of the scale we’ve reached: we’ve now been to all the villages in a district that our […]
Operations
Fighting fraud in Uganda
We recently dealt with our worst fraud case to date, with 2% of a round of transfers in Uganda diverted. This incident brought to light vulnerabilities which we have since addressed, and we don’t expect changes in performance going forward. We are making it a point to write openly about this case, however, because nonprofits […]
Operations
How would you explain what a PIN is?
M-Pesa is famously ubiquitous in Kenya, with more than half the adult population using it or some other form of mobile money. M-Pesa agents, who take users’ deposits and provide cash-outs, operate in most towns and even small villages. The breadth of the network has certainly made our work delivering cash transfers, even in rural, […]
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