GiveDirectly

GiveDirectly set up two emergency response program to the COVID-19 pandemic: one in the US, for which it has raised US$118 million, and one in African countries, for which it has raised US$76 million. The organization has sent cash relief to 116,000 families in the US and 342,000 families in Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Rwanda and Togo.[12] In Togo GiveDirectly used satellite and cellphone data to target needy people, delivering cash completely contactless. It built on an existing cash transfer program called Novissi introduced by the government of Togo. Money is paid via mobile money technology, with beneficiaries withdrawing money at local shops. GiveDirectly helped expand the program to certain rural areas where the government found it particularly difficult to identify the poorest beneficiaries. The machine learning algorithm uses two steps. First, it finds the poorest villages by analyzing, among other things, roof material, sizes of farm plots and the presence of paved or unpaved roads through satellite images. Second, it finds the poorest individuals within a village by analyzing their mobile phone data like lengths and frequency of phone calls, number of inbound versus outbound calls, and amount of mobile data used. After the poorest individuals are identified, they are asked to enroll via mobile phone.[13]

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.[14][15]

Working in rural Kenya, it plans to conduct a randomized control trial comparing 4 groups of villages:

• Long-term basic income: 40 villages with recipients receiving roughly $0.75 (nominal) per adult per day, delivered monthly for 12 years
• Short-term basic income: 80 villages with recipients receiving the same monthly amount, but only for 2 years
• Lump sum payments: 80 villages with recipients receiving a lump sum payment equivalent to the total value of payments of the short-term stream
• Control group: 100 villages not receiving cash transfers

More than 26,000 people will receive some type of cash transfer, with more than 6,000 receiving a long-term basic income.

In November 2019 an economics-oriented paper on the GiveDirectly experiment was published. It found the local fiscal multiplier to be around 2.6x.[16]

GiveDirectly has been named a GiveWell 'top rated' charity for each of the last 8 years: 2012,[20][21] 2013,[22] 2014,[23][24][25] 2015,[25][26] 2016,[27][28] 2017,[29] 2018,[30] 2019.[31]

After the release of GiveDirectly's impact self-evaluation in October 2013,[32] World Bank economist David McKenzie praised the robustness of the study's design and the clear disclosure of the study lead's conflict of interest, but raised two concerns:[33]

• The use of self-reporting made the results hard to interpret and rely on (this being a feature of any study that attempted to measure consumption).
• The subdivision of the sample into so many different groups meant that there was less statistical power that could be used to clearly decide which group had better outcomes.

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:[34]

• The observer-expectancy effect, where the people being asked questions may be subtly influenced in their answers by the experimenter's expectations.
• The lack of clear positive effect on long-term outcomes, as well as the lack of increased spending on health and education.