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Two recent studies released by Unicef’s Office of Research-Innocenti show the positive effects of cash transfers in Africa, on both increased income as well as improvements to families’ overall livelihoods. In the UK, the debate on basic income continues to pick up, with major Labour leaders expressing interest in the idea. GIVEDIRECTLY IN THE NEWS […]

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This week, co-founder Paul Niehaus sat down with Inc.’s Kimberly Weisul to talk cash transfers, evidence, and basic income. On basic income he told Kimberly that in our pilot we’ll be testing things like: “does security make people relax or… take more risks?” Quartz also covered the idea of time-use and basic income this week, […]

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This week in Salon Gleb Tsipursky discussed how the evidence on cash transfers and the story of a woman living in poverty helped change his mind on basic income. Meanwhile, Vox announced that basic income will be one of the topics at their Conversations conference and Ben Schiller in Fast Company covered Canada’s opinion on […]

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This week our own Paul Niehaus spoke on French radio about basic income and mobile technology in Kenya. “Kenya is already known as a leader in new technology to use to distribute its social benefits,” he said. In other news, Taylor Mayol in OZY cited GiveDirectly’s cash programs as a possible model for fighting poverty in […]

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This week Elizabeth MacBride argued in Quartz that humanitarian aid ought to be given to refugees in the form of cash transfers. “We didn’t really test things until about a decade ago in development,” said our own Paul Niehaus in the article, “we just now have the experimental evidence that people aren’t going to blow […]

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This week our own Joe Huston spoke to the Universal Income Project in San Francisco about GiveDirectly’s upcoming basic income pilot and recipient autonomy. “It’s hard to out farm a subsistence farmer,” he said “it turns out they’re pretty good at it.” In other news the Overseas Development Institute published a study, called “Understanding the […]

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This week, the 2013 randomized controlled trial on GiveDirectly’s work, led by Johannes Haushofer and Jeremy Shapiro, was published in the leading economics periodical, The Quarterly Journal of Economics. As Chris Weller summarized in Tech Insider, “the result: People who received the money were happier, more satisfied with life, less stressed, and depressed less often. […]

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This week the National Post, while discussing Ontario’s upcoming basic income pilot, claims that “basic income is the romper of economic policy.” More attention on this newest economic fashion is one reason why it needs to be rigorously studied. And in Devex Catherine Cheney takes a thoughtful look at the upcoming research on basic income, […]

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The newly released Future of Work Conference video features a host of interesting speakers including our own Michael Faye, who spoke about cash transfers and basic income. He says, “The impacts of cash are as heterogeneous as people themselves. If there is one lesson, it is that every individual has different unique needs.” On the […]

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This week, Alan Krueger announced that he will be joining the research team for GiveDirectly’s basic income pilot. Dr. Krueger is the former Chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and a professor at Princeton. As Max Ghenis remarked, “Krueger’s research has a history of influencing public policy.” In other exciting cash-policy news, the […]

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