Thanks Alex N.! We’ll have a look into this.
GiveDirectly
Karma: 2,320
Hi, yes this would be from self-reported data. We aren’t currently collecting detailed M&E data on economic indicators during this phase of work.
Good question. Digital literacy is fairly low and many people did not have smartphones until we ran this pilot. Language offerings are limited in free commercial offerings, particularly for voicenotes, which are essential for engagement in this group.
Hi NickLaing, you raise excellent points—this does raise ethical issues and it’s something that we have thought a lot about and have put systems in place to address. We do gather consent from recipients when they are initially enrolled, and we ensure that data is anonymised when it is analysed. We have built additional railguards into the chatbots (we tested exactly the types of questions you raised to check how the chatbot responded and then ensured that any questions that raised a red flag receive responses that link them to our call centre). Our safeguarding teams also monitor messages for anything problematic and address these with the appropriate level of engagement depending on the issues that surface. Our approach to safeguarding and guardrails is evolving as we learn—if you have additional suggestions of things we should be thinking about, we’d welcome these suggestions.
Hi! We’re taking a phased approach to our learning on digital innovation. These results are from the first phase of work—small pilots assessing uptake and usability through qualitative research (focus groups) and data from the chatbots. We are now running A/B tests of different prompts to see which ones respond most effectively to recipients. Once we know which prompts perform best, we will move on to A/B testing of cash versus cash plus chatbot to evaluate economic indicators that we believe from the micro-data of past studies are leading indicators of longer-term income.
We deliver cash transfers in Eastern DRC: https://GiveDirectly.org/drc
We also deliver cash transfers to Sudanese refugees fleeing to Uganda: https://muslimimpactlab.org/give-zakat-directly-to-sudanese-refugees/
Reach out to info@givedirectly.org if you want to learn more
While the broad cash program in this study is certainly more expensive per family than other global health programs, the researchers note that if the cash was targeted to pregnant women in their third trimester, it could be “comparably cost effective to a number of WHO-recommended maternal and child health interventions, even without taking into account other possible benefits of unconditional cash transfers (such as consumption gains).”
We’re launching a pilot this fall in Kenya specifically for pregnant women to learn just how much more cost-effectively cash can improve infant and maternal health, one of our many tests to improve our programs for specific outcomes.
(updated our post above to clarify this)
Darren “We don’t push hard for donations. Our primary goal is to educate and inspire, not fundraise. Donations are a bonus. We usually have sponsors for the videos, and the money we earn from those sponsors goes directly to the projects. In the case of the GiveDirectly video, we made a $200,000 donation, and anything beyond that is a bonus. However, someone who saw the video is now matching up to $150,000, which will help reach the fundraising goal.”
If you want to help this match succeed, reshare the campaign page or Darren’s X post.
Also here’s our blog on how we optimize matches to maximize impact.
You can read more about how the project came together on our blog. Adding a specific section below that might be of interest:
Working with the most watched person on Earth will help us reach more people in needBeast Philanthropy videos are typically seen by 20-40 million people and dubbed into over a dozen languages to improve accessibility. We expect this will help us reach more families in need. Here’s why:
Partnering with content creators means large, new audiences learn about direct cash
You may support direct cash giving, but most people still do not. GiveDirectly recently ran a survey of potential donors, and found only 13% of respondents had heard of us. Direct cash was their least favored way to help people in extreme poverty.
Clearly more people need to learn about the impact of our work. While we’re good at our main job of delivering cash to the most vulnerable families in the world, we’re not as good at reaching large audiences from our own channels and platforms –– few nonprofits are. Press and content creators are very good at it.
Beast Philanthropy’s video dispels common concerns about direct cashIn that same survey, most respondents said giving $1,000 to families in extreme poverty was not a good idea. Their most common concerns were that recipients…
may spend the money unwisely
need something else (training, education, resources)
won’t be able to make lasting improvements
We approached Beast Philanthropy because they excel at engaging audiences while showcasing the finer points of a charity. Their GiveDirectly video tackled the most common concerns about cash, highlights the dignity of giving choice, and documents the broader economic benefits – all in just 12 minutes.
Some of their viewers will start giving directly, helping reach more people living in extreme poverty with life-changing cash transfers.
Good call! Added
Fair point re: “nearly twice” vs. “over 50%.” Edited original point to reflect this update.
To the second point, the differences in data sources seem moot to the overall argument. If we stick just to OWID’s visual from 1990 to 2019 (pre-COVID), this is is still a 117 million person (43%) increase of the number people living in extreme poverty since 1990, which is certainly an undercount given the well-documented setbacks post 2019.
Responding below, much of which are direct quotes from the original post.
Eradicating extreme poverty is not a high bar, it’s actually the lowest and one very much worth clearing.
The $2.15/day threshold is not “completely arbitrary.” It’s set by the World Bank, is an estimate of what a person needs to afford a basic basket of goods including food, clothing, and shelter. It’s a rough measure of how many live in unacceptable deprivation in our wealthy world.
While this metric is limited, it’s also quite descriptive. The many symptoms of poverty – disease, starvation, education deprivation, psychological suffering – are improved when a family is less monetarily poor, and further still when their whole community is less poor.
Cash transfers have been shown to grow the wider economy
As cash transfers are spent by recipients, the cash multiplies. Research finds that because people spend this money locally buying goods, starting businesses, visiting clinics, or going to school, the local economy can grow by as much as 2.5x what you give. In effect, the money you give grows the entire economy.
Researchers also found minimal inflationary effects: “Average price inflation is 0.1%, and even during periods with the largest transfers, estimated price effects are less than 1%.”
Many countries use cash transfers to eliminate extreme poverty, which economic growth alone will not solve. (more here)
Cash transfers alone will not eradicate extreme poverty, as countries also need essential public goods like access to healthcare, well-maintained infrastructure, and dependable institutions to foster a thriving economy. However, cash transfers are still needed to help people take full advantage of these resources.
Take Rwanda as an example:
Over the past three decades, Rwanda has maintained peace and security, with the GDP growing annually by 5-10%.
The government has invested in education and healthcare, providing subsidies to make them widely accessible.
Despite these commendable strides, over half of Rwandans still live in extreme poverty.
This is why Rwanda is now using cash transfers as part of their social safety net to help their poorest citizens take full advantage of these other opportunities.
Even China, widely recognized for its economic growth and poverty reduction efforts, is using cash transfers to lift the final ~1% of their population out of extreme poverty. For more on why we should not expect extreme poverty to “solve itself” overtime through economic growth alone, read here.
As people escape extreme poverty, that total decreases year-over-year—explained in detail here.
Sure. We expanded the excerpt from the blog for clarity: “[GiveWell’s moral weight approach] results in a spreadsheet. This framework combines the views of a relatively small number of stakeholders and then applies those outcomes to millions of people. GiveDirectly believes that the weights that should count the most are those of the specific people we’re trying to help. Each individual will have their own specific needs, preferences, and aspirations. We have yet to see a place we worked in (village, county, country) where everyone made the same investments, so why prescribe the same solution for everyone? Why not treat each individual person living in poverty as exactly that, respecting their individuality and allowing them the dignity of pursuing their own goals?” This is to say, we don’t subscribe to GiveWell’s moral weights approach, but instead hold recipient’s preference as our north star.
Research finds people use these funds to improve their health, education, income, and self-reliance, ultimately reducing adult and child mortality. And these results can be sustained years into the future. [Footnote: Source on reducing adult & child mortality. Two examples of long-term cash impact: Uganda (12 years), Mexico (20 years).]
GiveDirectly’s baseline measures don’t date back that far, but we do expect research on 5- and 9-year follow-up measures sometime in 2024.
Cash transfers alone won’t eradicate extreme poverty globally, however they’re an under-funded and under-utilized tool that would massively reduce extreme poverty and work in compliment with other efforts.
It was an active choice to not make this post a structured point-by-point debate with GiveWell’s thinking as theirs is not the only guiding philosophy of how EAs think about issues of global health and development. With much of the $200B/year in Official Development Assistance going to interventions of question effectiveness and over a trillion dollars sitting in private foundations, the EA movement can and should open the aperture of how it thinks about what it recommends beyond the marginal donation.
We’re optimistic the movement could influence existing pots of money orders of magnitude larger than what it does today, thus doing even more good in the world. This could perhaps have been more clearly argued in the post, open to your thoughts / feedback!
That said, we have engaged with the the question of GiveWell under-valuing cash both in this post and in previous posts (see below)
How you score ‘effectiveness’ is ultimately subjective (see our blog), but it’s worth considering the vast range of benefits this single intervention can have
As that previous blog points out, “[GiveWell’s moral weight approach] results in a spreadsheet. This framework combines the views of a relatively small number of stakeholders and then applies those outcomes to millions of people. GiveDirectly believes that the weights that should count the most are those of the specific people we’re trying to help. Each individual will have their own specific needs, preferences, and aspirations. We have yet to see a place we worked in (village, county, country) where everyone made the same investments, so why prescribe the same solution for everyone? Why not treat each individual person living in poverty as exactly that, respecting their individuality and allowing them the dignity of pursuing their own goals?” This is to say, we don’t subscribe to GiveWell’s moral weights approach, but instead hold recipient’s preference as our north star.
While addressing diseases like malaria or river-blindness would reduce suffering, they are only endemic in some but not all places with high extreme poverty – in 2021, malaria impacted only a third of the extreme poor.[12] Giving cash is impactful nearly everywhere that extreme poverty persists.
The global health and development issues GiveWell’s list targets are relatively niche compared to the wide applicability of cash transfers. The funding gap opportunities they’ve identify are more limited still.
[Footnote] It’s worth noting that the charity evaluator GiveWell does not currently factor in these multiplier research results into their cost effectiveness analysis for GiveDirectly.
GiveWell is likely undervaluing cash by their own moral weight terms based on the research they have right now. They’ve commissioned other research that may further change their own ranking.
Thanks, very interesting insights re: healthcare access (you’d enjoy this pod with our research director who is a former medical doctor). The ~$15 is at market value for a phone, so the incentive isn’t especially appealing. That said, sometimes other members of a household will have a phone but the assigned recipient does not so elects to buy one.
Here’s the link in question: https://www.fsdafrica.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/YEG-Brochure-29.10.21.pdf
Hi @Robi Rahman we have a webinar on effective zakat this Saturday April 1. Hope you can come.
Hi David T., you are right to ask the question on whether people would rather have had the cash instead of a better chatbot. This is why we are starting with small pilots and using these to inform our next steps. So far the feedback has been very positive—people say that they wish they had had the chatbot earlier. Next we want to know if adding a chatbot boosts the impact of cash—if so, then rolling this out at larger scale will involve minimal costs but the benefits could be high. We don’t know of other non-profits that are offering unrestricted versions of chatbots at this point (many focus only on agricultural advice) - but we believe this offers the kind of information access that should be available to people and allows people to make decisions based on their own needs.