How it works. GiveDirectly transfers about $1,000 to very poor families over the course a year. It makes no rules or even suggestions about how to use the cash.
Since launching in 2011, the group has distributed about $15 million to communities in Kenya and Uganda. These are not the poorest countries in the region. Rather, they are at the center of Africa's revolution in mobile banking, which is crucial to GiveDirectly's strategy. A person in sub-Saharan Africa is 60 times more likely to have a mobile financial account than a European.
Once GiveDirectly has selected a village based on publicly-available poverty data, it uses an ingeniously simple method to identify who will receive money: it enrolls households who live in homes built with thatched roofs and mud floors (as opposed to corrugated metal roofs or concrete floors). The use of organic materials is a reliable indicator of severe poverty -- easy for members of the community to understand, and for GiveDirectly's staff to audit, the group states.
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