GiveDirectly is trusted by top charity reviewers, funders, and researchers…
… and over 130,000 donors like you to deliver cash directly to more than 1.6 million people in poverty.
Send life-changing money to people in need,
empowering them to get out of poverty.
By giving directly, you let them choose how best to improve their lives.
People in poverty know what they need most.
And it’s often surprising what they can achieve with a small sum of money.
How it works
Step 1: You make a donation
Step 2: We enroll eligible recipients
Chrissy from Malawi being enrolled by GiveDirectly field officer
We locate villages using poverty data from local governments and telecommunications companies. Most households are below the “international poverty line” (which means they are living on less than $750 a year — that’s $2.15 a day).
Step 3: We transfer your cash to the recipients
Recipients receive your cash on a simple mobile phone, which is the most secure and efficient way. Many recipients don’t already have cell phones, so we provide them with one at cost ($8).
The recipients use the cash on whatever they need most, typically on life-changing things — like a new roof, farmland, livestock, or education.
Step 4: We monitor and send you updates
We follow up to ensure there weren’t any issues with accessing or spending the funds. We also monitor how recipients use the money and share updates with you on the impact of your donation.
Help someone live a life as full as your own.
Why extreme poverty is such a persistent problem.
Worldwide, extreme poverty has fallen dramatically over the past 30 years, as countries have industrialized.
Poverty in Africa, though, has increased…
In Sub-Saharan Africa (PIP), the absolute number of people living in extreme poverty has increased even as the percentage has decreased. Today 100M more people live in extreme poverty than 1993.
About 700 million people still live on less than $785 per year (that’s $2.15 per day), which is known as the “International Poverty Line”). These people struggle to afford basics we take for granted: like a mattress, food, clothes, soap, a roof, medicine, shoes, a bicycle, education, electricity, shelter, a phone, sugar, diapers, a lamp, or clothes. Many struggle to eat once every two days.
They face challenges many of us can’t imagine.
These people survive in the face of incredible challenges.
Chezetsani: Struggles to feed family
“I have spent most of my life in extreme poverty with no means of finding money to buy food and clothes for the family. We could spend even 2 days without eating anything and seeing my children crying from hunger broke my heart even more.”
Rosine: Can’t afford diapers
“My baby is one month old, and I’m already overwhelmed by the expenses required to care for him. At times, I feel like a burden to my family, but I have to accept the situation and move forward. Occasionally, when my parents have some extra money, they help me buy baby soap and diapers.”
Gaudance: No livestock or farmland
“We barely make $1 a day. The biggest challenges we currently face are a dilapidated house, difficulty in supporting our 3 children’s education, and struggling to put food on the table. In our area, having land and livestock makes it easier to make a living, but unfortunately, we don’t have access to either.”
Florence: No safe shelter
“Our deteriorating house has always been a source of great concern for us. Watching our house inch closer to collapse was distressing, and we felt helpless. The walls had aged, the roof was in poor shape, and the situation worsened during the rainy season.”
Thanks to two breakthroughs, we now have an achievable plan to accelerate the end of extreme poverty.
In 2009, our founders had recently completed PhDs in economics at Harvard and MIT, at a time when new evidence about cash transfers coming from Brazil (Bolsa Familia) and Mexico (Progresa) was emerging.
Back then, in development economics (the study of poverty alleviation), people had only just begun to use rigorous randomized control trials (RCTs) to measure what works and doesn’t.
It quickly became apparent that many interventions didn’t work as well as expected. But a novel intervention — simply giving people cash — turned out to work surprisingly well.
At the same time, Kenyans had recently pioneered “mobile money,” allowing people to send and receive money through a simple SIM card, no bank account needed.
When the GiveDirectly co-founders realized there was no way for them to donate cash transfers directly to the world’s poorest, they pooled their funds and started operations in Kenya.
Quickly donors became interested in this seemingly “nuts” idea.
Since then, the academic results have proved them right. GiveDirectly has since run 20+ randomized controlled trials on our programs.
Our ultimate ambition is that no one on this planet would experience extreme poverty, and no one would have one of those nights when they have to send a kid to bed hungry, under a leaky roof, on the dirt floor because they can’t afford to feed, house, or support them. So, what would it take to do that?
The two breakthroughs.
Breakthrough #1: Mobile money is now prevalent, so now anyone can send cash directly to anyone in Africa (or elsewhere).
In 2007, mobile money was launched in Kenya, allowing anyone to send money from one phone to another with just a SIM card. This innovation leapfrogged over Western finance systems, and suddenly, for a $0.05 SIM card, you could go from unbanked to banked.
GiveDirectly used this technology to enroll, send, and follow-up with recipients using a digital payment stack.
Today, over 1.5 billion people across the globe, mostly in developing countries, have access to mobile money banking. 84% of Africans are reached by at least some cell network. This means the large majority of people in extreme poverty can receive cash aid completely digitally.
Breakthrough #2: Cash transfers were proven to work.
A cash transfer is a direct transfer of money to an eligible person.
Unconditional cash transfers means giving up control. The recipient can choose to spend the money on whatever they want. What if they choose to spend it on alcohol?
About 20 years ago, we started to test different solutions for fighting poverty — in the same way we test medicines — randomized trials — really the gold standard of testing. And we learned that giving cash to the poor worked a lot better than we had thought. In fact, we believe cash transfers could unlock the secret of ending extreme poverty worldwide.
There have now been 200+ different evaluations of unconditional cash transfer programs. In fact, it’s now by far the most-researched intervention for alleviating poverty, in part because it has taken a large body of evidence to convince policymakers to believe that they work.
What independent researchers find is that while the recipients use it differently, they almost universally use it well — whether it’s to educate their kids, to feed their family, or to invest in a business. For example, someone might go to school, learn to weld, and then using their cash transfer to buy welding equipment. That’s the power of cash. Cash says, “let the recipient decide what to spend money on. They know best what they need most.”
Rory Stewart was the UK’s Secretary of State for International Development. Here’s what he said after he visited the village where we ran one of our first trials:
“The results were absolutely staggering. This community had completely transformed the amount of electricity in the community; almost everybody was ending up with roofs; almost everybody had health insurance. There was a fantastic increase in the number of children in school. The whole place just felt better, happier. Honestly, in my entire life in international development, I’d never seen anything like this village.”
Rory Stewart
Former Secretary of State for the UK’s International Development
Six reasons cash transfers are so effective.
Reason 1: People in extreme poverty often don’t need knowledge or lack motivation. They lack capital.
Patrick, a recipient from our COVID-19 Response in Kenya, used his ~$120 transfer to reopen his lamp business, develop new products, and double his sales. In other words, Patrick already knows how to fish. He just lacks the money for a fishing rod.
See how Patrick used his pandemic relief cash to start restart his lamp business.
Reason 2: Different people need different things. Not everyone needs a goat.
People say, “Give a man a fish, feed him for a day; teach him to fish, feed him for a lifetime.” Sounds good at first, but on closer inspection, there are problems with that adage. It assumes that people have fishing rods or have the capital to buy a fishing rod. And that the person lives near a source of fish. It assumes they even want to fish. Or that we’re good at teaching people to fish (have you ever been to a training course you didn’t find useful?).
Joyce and Jacqueline are two real GiveDirectly recipients who live next door to each other. They live on the U.S. equivalent of about $365 a year.
What do these two women need? What is the solution we’re going to provide to that village? And who should choose?
- Joyce turns out to have been trained in haircutting in a salon. She used the money to buy the supplies to start her salon. She also decided to pay her children’s school fees
- Jackline decided she was going to address her water shortage issue and build a massive water tank that would not only serve her but would serve those around her, she could actually start selling water collected from her metal roof. She also started building out her little poultry farm.
So even though they live right next door to each other, they each needed completely different things.
If you work your way around a particular village, you find that everybody’s different:
🛒 Jeanne wants to open a grocery shop.
📚 Seraphine wants to get her children into school.
🩺 Esperance needs access health care.
🐄 Telesphore wants to get a cow so he can have milk and yogurt to sell.
👗 Marie wants to set up a tailoring business.
🛵 Damascene wants to get a motorbike taxi.
What should a donor do for that village? Should we send canned food? Should we send books and uniforms? Should we send sheep? Should we build houses? Should we donate motorbikes?
Or should we offer them the freedom to choose for themselves?
That freedom is cash.
Cash empowers recipients to go to the market and address their most pressing needs.
On our GDLive page, we publish our recipients’ reports of how they spent the money. The more stories you read, the more it becomes clear how varied their needs are, and how impossible it would have been for someone overseas to “prescribe” a one-size-fits-all solution.
Reason 3: Cash transfers are more efficient.
Giving cash maximizes the value of your donation ending up in the hands of those in need. But also the recipients are often much more efficient than an outsider at using that money.
People are good at getting things done locally. If you give them cash, they may work with their neighbors, using locally sourced materials, to repair and fix their house at a fraction of the cost that an overseas organization could do it. And, they’ll have money left over for other things.
Reason 4: Cash transfers are respectful — they put trust in the recipients.
People in poverty deserve the dignity to choose for themselves how best to improve their lives. Cash enables that choice.
And when people make their own choices, they take pride in their investments—in a way that doesn’t happen if somebody else does it for them. They take ownership over how they are going to transform their lives.
Reason 5: Cash transfers can be impactful everywhere there is extreme poverty (which isn’t true for other forms of aid).
Cash is fundamentally a local solution. Communities apply it to meet their unique needs. Other forms of aid are powerful in some settings, but not useful in others. Like malaria nets, which are effective at preventing malaria, but malaria is not endemic everywhere.
Cash transfers can help families living in deserts and rain forests. In wartime and in peacetime. In cities or in the countryside. Of the 700 million people in extreme poverty, all would be helped in some form by receiving cash.
This makes it a uniquely scalable solution. One that could significantly accelerate the end of extreme poverty in our lifetimes. That’s not to say it’s “one-size-fits-all,” as cash programs need to be designed consciously and safely for each environment. What is does mean is that we aren’t waiting around anymore for a breakthrough solution. Cash is that breakthrough.
Reason 6: When people spend their cash, something remarkable happens: it multiplies.
Because people spend this money locally buying goods, starting businesses, visiting clinics, or going to school, the local economy can grow by 2.5x what you give. Every $1,000 given can generate $2,500 in the community. Studies have found this happens with little to no inflation because there’s significant “slack” in the economy. Vendors are ready to produce and hire more, if only they had the customers.
When people first hear about cash transfers, they tend to worry about these six things.
Here are six common worries that people tend to have about cash transfers. All of them have been debunked through the 200+ studies on the impact of giving directly.
Worry 1: Do the recipients waste the money on alcohol or tobacco?
Truth: Recipients of cash do not tend to waste or misuse it.
Some have surely bought beer or gambled among the hundreds of millions who have received cash transfers. But systematic reviews of the evidence find that, on average, these behaviors are not increasing after receiving money.
If anything, they find the opposite.
30 studies across Latin America, Africa, and Asia found people spent less on temptation goods like alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and gambling after receiving transfers. This is on top of the many other positive outcomes, including reduction in domestic violence, improved mental health, and increases in school enrollment.
This article reviews 19 studies … on average cash transfers have a significant negative effect on total expenditures on temptation goods [alcohol, tobacco, etc.], … This negative result is supported by data from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, for both conditional and unconditional cash transfer programs. (source)
We re-analyze the data from seven randomized controlled trials of government-run cash transfer programs in six developing countries throughout the world, and find no systematic evidence that cash transfer programs discourage work. (source)
This article brings together evidence from seven experimental and non-experimental impact evaluations of government-run unconditional cash transfer programs … There is no evidence that cash transfers translated into an overall reduction of labor supply or work effort — in fact quite the opposite: the transfers were used to improve household income-generating activities. (source)
Worry 2: Will the free money discourage them from working?
Truth: There’s no evidence that receiving cash transfers decreases how much someone works.
An analysis of seven randomized controlled trials of cash transfer programs found no systematic evidence that these programs discourage work. The only exceptions were reductions in child labor and elderly workers — a favorable outcome. A recent study of our Kenya program found recipients shifting from wage labor to self-employment, meaning they are becoming more entrepreneurial and less dependent on casual work.
Worry 3: Will the money be lost to corruption and fraud?
Truth: Cash transfers skip most intermediaries, and loss to fraud is negligible — we know because we track it.
By eliminating intermediaries between donors and people living in poverty, direct giving reduces the opportunity for fraud. Your donation isn’t passed through governments or contractors; it goes straight to a mobile money account controlled by a person in poverty.
But like with any organization, there is still some risk of fraud, which GiveDirectly has a robust process for detecting, investigating, and resolving. Fraud does happen, but not at a higher rate than other forms of aid.
Worry 4: Will giving out lots of cash cause inflation?
Truth: Cash can have a multiplier effect that boosts the local economy without causing inflation.
Starting in 2014, independent researchers studied how GiveDirectly transfers affect the local economy: 10,500 poor households across 653 randomized villages in rural Kenya received ~$1,000. After 2.5 years of monthly surveys of businesses and households, researchers found that the cash transfers had a “multiplier” effect of 2.5x, meaning that every $1 of cash delivered generated $2.50 in additional spending or income for the surrounding economy. There was nearly no inflation in prices for goods and services.
That said, as we scale cash programs, we need to study this carefully to be sure this result applies in other areas.
Worry 5: Won’t recipients be right back where they started after they spend the money?
Truth: Cash transfers have proven long-term impacts, with recipients seeing income boosts and poverty reduction years later.
Studies find sustained impact 3, 5, even 12 years after direct cash was given. While there are certainly diminishing returns after a one-time cash payment, the evidence is clear that recipients use the money in a way that boosts their incomes for years on.
One study of our work found Kenyan recipients were 12% less poor than a control group 5-7 years later. Another found Ugandan men who received $380 in 2008 had 22% higher incomes in 2020 than a control group.
Worry 6: Would it be better to send micro-loans or “cash with conditions”?
Truth: Cash has much stronger evidence than micro-loans. Conditional cash often has high costs without enough benefits.
Despite microfinance’s popularity, four major reviews found that evidence of micro-loans’ impact is scarce and inconclusive. Also, many people in poverty need to spend on investments that will not generate immediate income to pay back a loan, like education, medical treatment, and sanitation.
Others support giving cash with conditions, to incentivize certain “positive” behaviors. This requires costly monitoring, and there’s little research to suggest that the benefits outweigh the added costs. One conditional program estimated admin costs as high as 63% of all transfers made in the first 3 years. Those funds could instead be used to reach more people. Unconditionality also preserves recipient dignity, empowering people to make their own decisions rather than pressuring them to make ones “experts” prefer.
Why cash transfers are a more effective way to reduce poverty than traditional charities.
Traditional charities don’t work as well as you might guess.
Over $1.1 trillion in foreign aid has been to Africa over the past 30 years. But 1 in 3 people there are still in extreme poverty. In part, progress has stalled because the large share of money meant to lift people out of poverty does not go directly to them, but rather to consultants or goods.
Money gets “lost” at each stage.
At each stage, some money is spent on costs.
The chain of delivery is complicated, too. A donor gives to an international organization or a global NGO, who gives to the subsidiary, who gives to a local partner—and then, ultimately, something winds up in the hands of recipients.
“Unwanted gifts.”
When donors or aid organizations decide what to give, recipients rarely get what they truly need. Soap, canned goods, or chickens might seem helpful, but these top-down solutions—often devised by “experts” — frequently miss the mark.
The same principle applies after a hurricane in the U.S. One neighbor might replace their car to get to work, another might repair their home, and a third might buy learning equipment for their kids to continue schooling during the crisis. Each person’s needs are different, shaped by their unique circumstances.
In 2014, 70% of Syrian refugees ended up selling the food they received, so they could buy what they actually needed. Selling aid is often prohibited so recipients will get a fraction of the value on the black market.
In Bihar, India, recipients received in-kind vouchers, which they could exchange for specific goods or services. 82% of them exchanged their vouchers for cash, often at a discounted rate.
It is hard to find a skills training program that passes a simple cost-benefit test. After repeated studies of technical, vocational, and business skills training programs, most programs do not have positive impacts … Those that do are often so expensive that costs far outweigh benefits. And most poor people turn these programs down or drop out. This is incredible given that the World Bank alone invests nearly a billion dollars a year in skills training programs of some form. (source)
In its heyday, microcredit was the basis for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize and embraced by policymakers, donors, and funders worldwide as an effective policy tool. … Summarizing and interpreting results across [six] studies, we note a consistent pattern of modestly positive, but not transformative, effects. (source)
… FFS [Farmer Field Schools] has been used to train 12 million farmers in over 90 countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America, … Drawing on a systematic review of over 500 documents, this study finds that although FFSs have changed agricultural practices and raised yields in pilot projects, they have not been effective when taken to scale. (source)
For further reading, see our research on cash transfers.
Cash transfers have been proven. They work, and last.
Cash transfers have been researched more than any other poverty intervention.
There are now about 200+ academic studies that show that recipients use the money well, and that the transfers helped the people in poverty to improve their health, education, income, self-reliance, and more.
So, why has cash been evaluated so much more than other interventions?
The answer is that we’re all understandably skeptical that people won’t waste the money — that they won’t spend it on alcohol or drugs, or to stop working. So, we keep testing it time and again, and we keep finding the same thing: people don’t waste the money.
Cash transfers have been shown to drive a range of impacts — and these results are sustained into the future.
Many people (including us) grew up hearing that “you can’t just give money to poor people.” As it turns out, this view was largely based on anecdote and hearsay; the first rigorous experiments testing this approach (and many others) did not begin until the 1990s. Since then we have learned an enormous amount about the impacts that unconditional cash transfers have had on the lives of people living in poverty, with over 200+ studies from around the world.
We actively engage in producing new evidence, through 20+ randomized control trial studies.
For further reading, see our overview on existing research on cash transfers.
Independent reviewers agree that cash is effective at helping people living in poverty.
Governments, non-profits, and researchers have tested variants of “just giving money” all over the world.
Evidence was extracted from 165 studies, covering 56 cash transfer programmes in low- and middle-income countries … There is strong evidence that cash transfers are associated with reductions in monetary poverty. (source)
Cash transfers have the strongest track record we’ve seen for a non-health intervention, and are a priority program of ours. (source)
Cash transfers are more cost effective than vouchers which are more cost effective than in‐kind food assistance. (source)
Cash transfers are one of the more thoroughly researched forms of development intervention. (source)
Recipients of cash typically end up less poor and put cash towards improving different aspects of their lives.
The evidence consistently showed an increase in total expenditure and food expenditure and a reduction in poverty measures … There is robust evidence that cash transfers increase beneficiaries’ savings, investment in livestock and, to a lesser extent, agricultural assets. (source)
The existing body of evidence, which is based on several cluster‐RCTs, suggests that UCTs have probably had a large, clinically meaningful, beneficial effect on the likelihood of having had any illness … (source)
Using data from 75 reports that cover 35 different studies, the authors find that both conditional cash transfers and unconditional cash transfers improve the odds of being enrolled in and attending school compared to no cash transfer program. (source)
The world has the money and means to tackle world extreme poverty today…
… in fact, wealthy nations today spend much more on international aid than would be needed to bring everyone in the world out of extreme poverty.
Living above $785/year is not luxury; it’s simply not deprivation. Eradicating extreme poverty is not a high bar; it’s the lowest, and one the world could already afford to clear.
The “poverty gap” is the amount we’d need to bring everyone below the extreme poverty line above it. It’s currently $100 billion (or about 81% of what Americans spend on their pets).
In 2005, for the first time in history, the amount we gave to international aid actually exceeded the poverty gap.
We now spend $168 billion on international aid.
So, we spend much more on international aid than it would take to end poverty! Which means that if we could perfectly know who was under the poverty line and perfectly get them money, we could end poverty today.
The poverty gap is now much less than the world spends on foreign aid and philanthropy — which means that if we could perfectly know who was under the poverty line and perfectly get them money, we could end poverty today.
Unlike other forms of aid, cash can efficiently scale. It provides us with the most straightforward mechanism to accelerate the end of extreme poverty.
Unfortunately, though, we still need to spread the word, because only a tiny fraction of aid budgets and charitable giving are sent via cash transfers. Currently, it’s estimated that less than 5% of development budgets are given directly as cash. We, as philanthropists, have decided we will choose on behalf of other people; and by doing this we will not allow them to choose.
We are on a mission to change that. Since we began in 2009, we have been gathering the evidence for cash transfers, and building the processes that make cash transfers increasingly efficient and easy to roll out. When you donate, in addition to you directly helping people in poverty, you also help us to build more evidence that cash transfers work. And if you donate to our “Where it’s needed most” program, you also help us to improve our processes.
The more momentum we get, the more we believe larger institutions and governments will be persuaded to allocate their budgets to cash transfers.