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GiveDirectly’s own Ian Bassin talks about our basic income pilot in depth in a detailed interview with Impakter magazine. On NPR, the consequences of poverty and mental health are discussed using recent scientific evaluations, including a study on GiveDirectly’s own work which showed that cash transfers can reduce stress levels. And around the world the […]

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In an interview with Vox, Melinda Gates mentions cash as a well-researched and effective anti-poverty intervention. Elsewhere, in basic income news, Eduardo Porter, in a New York Times story about Hillary Clinton’s policy to fight poverty in the US proposes a universal basic income for kids and a French legislative report announces a plan for […]

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Co-founder Paul Niehaus talked about the saying “teach a man to fish…” in a lively conversation with Tiny Spark podcast’s Amy Costello. Also this week, the World Bank and its President Jim Yong Kim continued to advocate for cash transfers to the poor as an effective policy following their report last week. And in basic […]

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This week the World Bank released a comprehensive report on fighting global poverty and increasing global prosperity. One of their six policy recommendations: cash transfers to poor families. In a speech, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim repeated the call for cash in policy proposals. In India top economist Arvind Subramanian voiced his support for […]

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In a video on technological unemployment, Robert Reich concludes, “Interest in a basic income is surging,” before describing our pilot and it’s ability to produce rigorous evidence on the impact of a basic income. Outside the United States, The Economist described how cash can help solve another of the world’s pressing problems: the refugee crisis. […]

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This week, we announced new details on our basic income pilot, including the size of the pilot, the study design, and the timeline: that we are preparing to begin payments to an initial pilot village in late October. The announcement was subsequently covered by Business Insider and Basic Income News. This weekend NPR separately reported […]

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From the GiveDirectly blog, co-founder Paul Niehaus writes about a recent paper on the long-term impacts of cash transfers, commenting, “A study like this from the US is news.” Commentary on using direct cash grants to help refugees also appeared this week in The New York Times, with a thorough investigation of how cash is […]

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Co-founder Michael Faye appeared this weekend on CCTV America. When asked if GiveDirectly considered putting constraints on our transfers he replied, “For a long time we’ve thought that we needed to put constraints on the poor for what they could use the money for. And the reality is that poverty itself puts constraints on the […]

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We are pleased that Business Insider has corrected several aspects of this afternoon’s piece on our basic income experiment. The original claimed that the project could run into “a fatal problem” if some people choose not to participate, which is incorrect. It is actually quite common for some people to opt not to participate in […]

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