I'm raising funds for GiveDirectly (where I work!) -- specifically for our Yemen program. What we do is really simple -- we use technology to send cash to people in poverty, no strings attached.

For this particular program, 100% of your donation will be delivered as cash. So if you donate $100, exactly $100 will be delivered to a family displaced by the civil war in Yemen (which the UN has called "the world's worst humanitarian program). And I'll also match donations up to $1,500 USD 🙂

Why cash transfers, you may ask? Cash has the largest evidence-base of any anti-poverty intervention (1,000+ independent, academic studies), and research shows it works better than most other (more complicated) global aid interventions. People make productive investments with cash, and it can drive a range of positive impacts through increased earnings, access to education, health improvements, and more.

I joined GiveDirectly because I believe strongly that people living in poverty deserve the dignity to choose for themselves how best to improve their lives vs. letting aid organizations choose for them. People buy food, send their kids to school, buy livestock, fix their houses, invest in businesses, connect to electricity etc. And seeing first-hand how our recipients spend the cash on a trip to Kenya made me an even bigger believer!

And people don't waste it. A World Bank meta-analysis of 19 studies around the world found that cash transfers are not used for alcohol and tobacco at any significant levels.

One closing thought. Extreme poverty means someone is living on less than USD $2/day. That amount is already adjusted to purchasing power in the U.S. -- so take what $2/day can get you in the U.S. -- and imagine what life is like for someone who lives on that little. If you make a salary of $75,000/year, your income is roughly 100x higher than someone living in extreme poverty. Put differently, every $1 you give would go 100x further to someone in poverty than it would in your own life.

So please consider giving directly to someone in Yemen if you can!

Thanks everyone!
Walid

About GiveDirectly

GiveDirectly has distributed $580M+ to 1.5M people in poverty over the past decade. The Guardian says they are sending shockwaves through the charity sector” and Fast Company ranked them in the world's top 5 most innovative organizations in finance. In 2020, they became the fastest-growing nonprofit in the world.

19 randomized evaluations demonstrate their programs have significant positive impacts on the health, education, happiness and economic wellbeing of recipients and their children. Head-to-head, their cash transfers comfortably outperformed a USAID youth workforce readiness program, and led to incomes twice as high more than one year later. Neighbors of GiveDirectly recipients benefit from their programs almost as much as direct recipients, as the cash injects life into local economies.

In Kenya, they're delivering the world's largest and longest universal basic income to 20,000 people for up to 12 years. In Togo, they leveraged machine learning, satellite imagery and cell phone metadata to identify and remotely enroll 138,000 people living in poverty, sending them COVID relief payments within days. Their donors include Google, USAID, Canva, MacKenzie Scott, Jack Dorsey and Good Ventures. Inspired by a pilot collaboration with Canva, they're now setting their sights on the next level of scale; to end poverty across an entire country.

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