Give Directly to Families in Greatest Need for the Most Impact
Tis the season and here are some options - global and local
I’ve joined a batch of more than two dozen Substackers, wrangled by the Slow Boring team, to help send money to those on the planet for whom a small infusion can be life changing. Use this link - givedirectly.org/sustain - and your contribution will be boosted by a 1.5 x match.
Here’s an except from Yglesias’s 2023 post explaining why he’s been supporting the organization and cash pipeline Give Directly:
Cash transfer programs have two notable (and appealing) qualities:
They’re pretty straightforward to study in a way that clearly demonstrates their impacts. It’s conceivable that a person could react to a cash windfall with some mix of unhealthy behaviors (blowing it on booze) or short-sightedness (working less), either of which could leave them worse off in the longer-term. But researchers have been able to conduct many studies on whether and how they actually help.
They’re relatively easy to scale. The landscape is littered with efforts to improve education or job training that work well in small settings with highly motivated instructors but that fail at larger scale. Cash transfers, by contrast, can just be done in more villages if more money is available and if we are confident that giving people money works.
And I think we should be pretty confident that it does. Francesca Bastagli, Jessica Hagen-Zanker, and Georgina Sturge did a meta-analysis of studies, and while there are plenty of null results across at least some dimension of outcomes, there are very few negative ones.
It’s too bad that studies have failed to find benefits to education, employment, and health. I’d like to be able to say that every single study concludes that access to a cash windfall makes people healthier and better educated in a way that raises employment and generates a positive flywheel of development. And there certainly are some studies that find that, but the honest truth is that money isn’t magic.
The good news, though, is that even on employment, there are very few studies showing a negative effect.
Families who receive money from GiveDirectly enjoy a short-term boost in their well-being, and there’s a decent chance they will also secure long-term benefits on at least some of these other dimensions.
The full post is here:
It’s worth stressing that a foundational driver of this kind of philanthropy is the shift to digital financial transactions in a widening array of developing countries. Read about the Rwanda digital economy here. A wider view is offered in this open-access paper in the journal Information Economics and Policy: “Digital payment systems in emerging economies: Lessons from Kenya, India, Brazil, and Peru.”
I saw one fascinating aspect of this in India when reporting on clean cooking challenges. India was able to shift a longstanding general subsidy for propane, a k a LPG, from the middle class to the poorest families because India’s digital finance system made it possible for the public to trust the benefit was actually going to households most in need.
If you want a second opinion on Give Directly, Avantika Chilkoti of The Economist has weighed in:
Another option is to donate via my friend and former colleague Nick Kristof’s annual poverty-focused giving project, which gives you some substantial amplifying power through big matching gifts this year. As he writes:
To donate, visit KristofImpact.org. As in the past, generous supporters are matching donations to each of the nonprofits I recommend. Even better, this year all of the resulting total will be matched again by Bloomberg Philanthropies, so that each $1 from you generates $4 for the nonprofit.
He says the revenue will go to:
The Mutual Aid Sudan Coalition supports 26,000 Sudanese volunteers in grass roots efforts called Emergency Response Rooms that are saving lives in Sudan as it endures what is probably the world’s worst humanitarian crisis….
Helen Keller Intl is one of my favorite nonprofits because it is dazzlingly cost-effective in fighting blindness and malnutrition. I’ve seen it operate in many countries in Africa and Asia, and in my view it offers a return on investment that no hedge fund could ever match….
Vision To Learn operates here in the United States, getting glasses in the hands of children — and thus giving them a better chance to succeed in school.
And there’s that big match:
Donations to all three of these charities are tax-deductible, and if you donate through my KristofImpact.org website the credit card fees are covered by my partner in this effort, Focusing Philanthropy. That means 100 cents of the dollar will reach the nonprofit you select. Except that this year, because of the double matches, it’s 400 cents.
Give locally, too
Initially propelled by the government shutdown and Trump impacts on food assistance, we began donating to the Loaves and Fishes food pantry up the road in Ellsworth, Maine, this fall and will do so regularly going forward. They’re also helping nourish minds and boost job prospects by becoming a free hub for digital access:
Weigh in with your local or global choices for helping build a thriving planet for all.
And of course consider helping sustain what I’m doing here: