Is It Nuts to Give to the Poor Without Strings Attached?
A month earlier, Omondi told me, a couple of strangers showed up in his village, and explained
that they worked for a charity, GiveDirectly, that gave money to poor people without any preconditions.
But they also planned to differentiate their charity; whereas most of the government programs give people money for as long as they
qualify, GiveDirectly offers people a one-time grant, spread over the course of several months, and without any requirements.
After Mexico’s economic crisis in the mid-1990s, Santiago Levy, a government economist, proposed getting rid of subsidies for milk, tortillas and other staples, and replacing them with a program
that just gave money to the very poor, as long as they sent their children to school and took them for regular health checkups.
A few months after the group sent out its second round of payments to Omondi’s village,
I spent two days walking around the area in Siaya where GiveDirectly is working.
The results were promising; researchers found that children in the cash program were more likely
to stay in school, families were less likely to get sick and people ate a more healthful diet.
“I’m hopeful about GiveDirectly’s model, but what they’re doing is very different from what some of the research has suggested
is really working,” Chris Blattman, an economist who teaches at Columbia and who studies cash transfers, told me.
