Like many of you, we’ve seen the flooding and devastation created by Hurricane Harvey, and we’ve wished for a way to help those families directly. Unfortunately, there’s still no way for the public to send money directly to those families in need. So when some folks from our team said they wanted to head to […]
Blog - Operations
Candid thoughts from staff, donors, and recipients on our work and the broader movement towards cash transfers.
Operations
Update on UBI and the Kenyan election
Folks, We’ve decided to postpone the launch of our basic income initiative in Kenya until after the new election. Earlier this month Kenya’s Supreme Court voted to nullify the August 8th presidential election results. Presidential candidate Ralia Odinga challenged sitting president Uhuru Kenyatta’s 54% win and appealed to the Supreme Court that the election had […]
Operations
Improving our call center
Our call center team is a critical part of GiveDirectly’s work in Kenya – it includes about 20 staff, who are based in our main office in Nairobi and handle a range of recipient-facing issues. They contact recipients to confirm that transfers are received successfully and they capture recipient responses for GDLive. The call center […]
Operations, Research
Cash to coffee farmers in eastern Uganda
Historically, when an aid organization or government wants to help coffee farmers improve their lives, they give in-kind agricultural interventions, such as seedlings and training. But what if instead of giving goods and services, we just gave farmers cash? Catherine has received transfers as part of BSZ’s experiment in Uganda. You can follow her story, […]
Operations, Research
Unconditional cash transfers and intrahousehold conflict: A pilot study in Kenya
Intimate partner violence is a significant challenge in Kenya, as in other developing countries. Nearly 40% of ever-married Kenyan women report physical abuse by a spouse (KNBS and ICF Macro 2010), and in a separate survey, almost 90% report some form of emotionally abusive treatment (Haushofer and Shapiro 2016). Women who are subject to physical […]
Operations
On accepting fundraising donations
Donors have been asking us why they can’t direct online donations to pay for fundraising, which could potentially generate tremendous leverage for them (details below). It’s a fair question. Here’s how we think about it. For context, we’re not happy with the status quo in which donors typically have very little information about how their […]
Operations
What it’s like to receive a basic income
Last October we began sending monthly universal basic income (UBI) payments to 95 people living in a rural village in Western Kenya. While people in 200 villages will eventually receive cash transfers as part of our test of a UBI, we wanted to begin with a one-village pilot. Doing so allows us to test and […]
Operations
Sending cash to remote places
This year, we are running a small pilot in Uganda’s Acholi sub-region, on the border with South Sudan. Until just over ten years ago, this area was the heartland of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, and the region was embroiled in a protracted civil war. Today, Acholi is at peace, but its people remain amongst […]
Operations
Research Director Field Studies – Day 3: Cash transfer experts
In the final part of this three-part series, GiveDirectly’s Research Director Michael Cooke discusses key takeaways from his trip to visit field teams and recipients in Kenya.At GiveDirectly we talk a lot about the poor being the true poverty experts. Today I had the great privilege of being able to ask questions of poverty experts […]
Operations
Research Director Field Studies – Day 2: Gimoro amora
In the second part of this three-part series, GiveDirectly’s Research Director Michael Cooke discusses key takeaways from his trip to visit field teams and recipients in Kenya. Today I went out with GiveDirectly field staff to shadow the process of enrolling new program recipients. Luo was the primary spoken language of the recipients in the […]
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