Website givedirectly.org | Founded 2008 | |
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Key people Paul NiehausRohit WanchooMichael FayeJeremy Shapiro Employees Type of business Alleviating extreme poverty through cash transfers; United States IRS exemption status: 501(c)(3) under the name "GiveDirectly, Inc." Similar GiveWell, Giving What We Can, Against Malaria Foundation, Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, Innovations for Poverty Action Profiles |
Giving game at ohio state givedirectly soil pratham against malaria foundation
GiveDirectly is a nonprofit organization operating in East Africa that helps families living in extreme poverty by making unconditional cash transfers to them via mobile phone. GiveDirectly transfers funds to people in Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda.
Contents
- Giving game at ohio state givedirectly soil pratham against malaria foundation
- History
- Cash transfers
- Basic income experiment
- Evidence of impact
- Self evaluation
- Funding
- GiveWell reviews
- Reception by development economists
- Impact on setting cash transfers as a benchmark
- Media coverage
- References
History
According to its website:
GiveDirectly was founded by Paul Niehaus, Michael Faye, Rohit Wanchoo and Jeremy Shapiro, who were studying economic development at Harvard and MIT at the time and also looking for the most effective way to give their own money to reduce poverty. They found that cash transfers had a strong evidence base, and that the rapid growth of mobile payments technology in emerging markets had opened the door to delivering cash transfers securely and efficiently on an unprecedented scale. They created GiveDirectly as a private giving circle in 2009 and opened it to the public in 2011 after two years of operational testing.
GiveDirectly's operations were initially focused on Kenya, before expanding to Uganda in November 2013. In 2016, the organization expanded to include operations in Rwanda.
In December 2012, GiveDirectly received a $2.4M Global Impact Award from Google. In June 2014, the founders of GiveDirectly announced plans to create a for-profit technology company, Segovia, aimed at improving the efficiency of cash transfer distributions in the developing world. In August 2015, GiveDirectly received a $25M grant from Good Ventures.
In April 2016, GiveDirectly announced a $30M initiative to test universal basic income in order to "try to permanently end extreme poverty across dozens of villages and thousands of people in Kenya by guaranteeing them an ongoing income high enough to meet their basic needs" and, if it works, pave the way for implementation in other regions.
Cash transfers
GiveDirectly distributes cash transfers to extremely poor families in East Africa using end-to-end electronic monitoring and payment technology. Their process follows four basic steps:
The average recipient family lives on $0.65 per day, making the $1,000 they receive more than one year's budget for a typical household.
Basic income experiment
In April 2016 GiveDirectly announced that they would be conducting a 12-year experiment to test the impact of a universal basic income on a region in Western Kenya.
Working in rural Kenya, GiveDirectly will conduct a randomized control trial comparing 4 groups of villages:
More than 26,000 people will receive some type of cash transfer, with more than 6,000 receiving a long-term basic income.
Evidence of impact
Cash transfers like those that GiveDirectly distributes have arguably the strongest existing evidence base among anti-poverty tools, with dozens of high-quality evaluations of cash transfer programs spanning Africa, Asia, and Latin America including both unconditional and conditional cash transfers. In a report on over 150 cash transfer studies, the think-tank ODI wrote: "the evidence reflects how powerful a policy instrument cash transfers can be, and highlights the range of potential benefits for beneficiaries." An MIT study of six randomized controlled trials (RCTs) shows that the poor do not stop working when they receive cash. A meta-study by economists at the World Bank and Stanford, aggregating dozens of cash transfer RCTs, found that the poor do not spend more on alcohol or tobacco, in fact, they spend less.
Self-evaluation
In 2016, GiveDirectly partnered with Innovations for Poverty Action on a self-evaluation project funded by the National Institute of Health to collect evidence on their operations that could be used to judge their effectiveness. The research was led by Johannes Haushofer of Princeton University and Jeremy Shapiro, a development economist, co-founder of GiveDirectly, and a member of the GiveDirectly board until 2012. GiveDirectly preregistered the study, identified what variables need to be measured, and specified their predictions, which could then be tested against the evidence. The working paper was released in October 2013 and showed that the impact per $1,000 distributed included encouraging increases in earnings (+$270), assets (+$430), and nutrition spend (+$330). There was a 0% impact on alcohol and tobacco spending.
Funding
GiveDirectly collects donations from private donors on its website and has received grants from a number of foundations. The organization's most significant funding partner has been Good Ventures, a private foundation started by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, former Wall Street Journal writer Cari Tuna. Good Ventures works in close collaboration with charity evaluator GiveWell and most of its grants to GiveDirectly were recommended by GiveWell.
GiveWell reviews
GiveDirectly has been named a GiveWell 'top rated' charity for each of the last 5 years.
Reception by development economists
After the release of GiveDirectly's impact self-evaluation in October 2013, World Bank economist David McKenzie offered his thoughts on the study. He praised the robustness of the study's design and the clear disclosure of the study lead's conflict of interest, but raised two concerns:
Chris Blattman, a blogger and academic in the area of development economics, with a particular focus on randomized controlled trials, also blogged the study. He expressed two main reservations:
Impact on setting cash transfers as a benchmark
Jeremy Shapiro, a GiveDirectly co-founder and the person who published GiveDirectly's impact evaluation, has argued for using cash transfers (and more specifically, unconditional cash transfers) as a benchmark against which other development interventions should be evaluated, due to the simplicity and scalability of cash transfers.
Others who have also endorsed the idea of using cash transfers as a benchmark, citing GiveDirectly, include Innovations for Poverty Action and GiveWell.