GiveDirectly
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| Founded | 2008 |
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| Type | Alleviating extreme poverty through cash transfers United States IRS exemption status: 501(c)(3) under the name "GiveDirectly, Inc." |
| Location | |
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Area served
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Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda |
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Employees
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15 paid domestic and senior field staff; additional paid field staff in Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda |
| Website | givedirectly |
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.
GiveDirectly originated a giving circle started by Paul Niehaus, Michael Faye, Rohit Wanchoo, and Jeremy Shapiro, students at MIT and Harvard, based on their research into philanthropy. In 2012 they formalized their operation into GiveDirectly.
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.
GiveDirectly distributes cash transfers to extremely poor families in East Africa using end-to-end electronic monitoring and payment technology. Their process follows four 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.
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, it plans to 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.
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