GiveDirectly sends around $1,000 directly to households living in extreme poverty in Africa, with no conditions and no intermediaries. Unconditional cash transfers are among the most thoroughly documented philanthropic interventions in the world. Donors based in France can give directly through the organisation's website, but no tax reduction is currently available.
International aid has largely worked the same way for decades: specialists decide what people living in poverty need, design programmes, recruit field teams, purchase supplies, and deliver a predetermined solution. GiveDirectly does exactly the opposite.
Founded in 2009, the organisation sends money directly to households living in extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa — with no conditions and no intermediaries. No form to fill in, no obligation to fulfil, no programme to enrol in. Recipients receive a transfer to their mobile phone and decide for themselves how to use it.
This choice is not naïve: it rests on an evidence-based conviction — that people living in poverty know better than anyone else what they need, and that placing resources directly in their hands is sometimes more effective than sending aid designed thousands of miles away.
GiveDirectly targets villages where more than 80% of residents live below the extreme poverty threshold, defined as $2.15 per day. Eligibility is deliberately broad: any household with at least one adult member permanently residing in the village can receive a transfer, provided it has not already benefited from one.
The transfer amounts to around $1,000 — roughly equivalent to one year's consumption for a very poor household. It is sent via local mobile money platforms. If a household has no telephone, GiveDirectly provides one, with the cost deducted from the transfer amount.
Since 2009, GiveDirectly has distributed more than one billion dollars to over 2 million people living in poverty.[1] The programme currently operates in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, and Uganda.
Randomised controlled trials conducted directly on GiveDirectly's programme — the most widely cited being Haushofer & Shapiro in Kenya — precisely document the choices made by recipient households.[2] Four main categories of expenditure emerge consistently.
These choices are not interchangeable. A household without a weatherproof roof will prioritise the roof. One that is already adequately housed will invest differently. This is precisely what traditional aid programmes — designed in advance for everyone — cannot replicate.
Unconditional cash transfers are one of the most thoroughly documented interventions in the field of poverty reduction. Hundreds of studies have analysed their effects, and GiveDirectly — through its scale and openness to external research — has played a central role in building this body of evidence.
The results converge on several robust findings. In the year following a transfer, recipient households consume more, eat better, and see their food security improve in measurable ways. Their psychological wellbeing also improves. They accumulate durable assets, invested primarily in metal roofing, livestock, or furniture. And contrary to the most frequently raised objection, the studies show no detectable increase in spending on alcohol or tobacco.[2]
The long-term effects of cash transfers are harder to measure, and multi-year studies remain rare across all philanthropic interventions — not just for GiveDirectly.
Preliminary results from a follow-up study show that 5–7 years after receiving a single transfer, recipient households were still consuming 12% more than control-group households — a gap almost identical to the one measured two years after the transfer. GiveWell, which cites these figures, notes that it does not place much weight on them for the time being, as they have not yet undergone full peer review.[3] If confirmed, these results would considerably strengthen estimates of the programme's impact.
What is known with greater certainty: Ugandan men who received $380 in 2008 had incomes 22% higher than those in the control group in 2020 — twelve years later.[3]
One of the most significant advances in understanding cash transfers has been the measurement of their effects on non-recipients. When a household receives money and spends it locally, economic activity is generated throughout the village: traders sell more, craftspeople work more, other households benefit indirectly.
A study by Egger et al. published in 2022 measured the general equilibrium effects of GiveDirectly's programme in Kenya: for every $1,000 injected into a community, $2,500 of local economic activity was generated, with no notable price inflation.[4] This 2.5× multiplier played a central role in GiveWell's 2024 reassessment, which we examine in the next section.
GiveWell is an independent evaluator that identifies the highest-impact charities in global health and poverty reduction. Mieux Donner draws on their analyses and enables donors in France to support some of their recommended programmes.
GiveWell took an interest in GiveDirectly as early as 2011, when the organisation had only just been founded. For several years, GiveDirectly appeared among its top charities recommended to donors. GiveWell has not directed funds towards GiveDirectly since 2015, but for a long time used its programme as a baseline against which to evaluate and compare the impact of every other organisation it analyses.
This benchmark status is itself a mark of recognition: it meant that any intervention recommended by GiveWell had to demonstrate that it does significantly better than simply distributing cash directly.
In November 2024, GiveWell published a comprehensive reassessment of GiveDirectly's programme — the first since 2019. This reassessment concludes that the programme is 3 to 4 times more cost-effective than GiveWell had previously estimated.[5]
Two main factors explain this upward revision. First, the incorporation of the multiplier effects on the local economy documented by Egger et al., which alone account for around half of the increase. Second, the modelling of the programme in countries poorer than Kenya — such as Malawi — where the baseline consumption of recipients is even lower, which mechanically increases the relative value of the transfer.
GiveWell has since modified its benchmark baseline so that it no longer rests directly on GiveDirectly, whilst maintaining an equivalent numerical value, in order to avoid any confusion between the programme itself and the comparison tool.
Despite this upward revision, GiveWell estimates that the programme represents around 30–40% of the cost-effectiveness of its best current funding opportunity, and that it does not yet clear their bar for active recommendation to donors.[5]
Put another way: GiveDirectly is solid, well-studied, and more effective than one might expect. But distributing insecticide-treated bed nets or vitamin A supplements in the most disadvantaged contexts remains, according to GiveWell's models, still two to three times more cost-effective.
To explore whether programme variants could clear that bar, GiveWell awarded GiveDirectly a grant in March 2025 to test new approaches, including more precise targeting of the poorest households in Mozambique and Uganda.[6]
This positioning should not be read as a repudiation. GiveDirectly remains one of the most thoroughly documented and transparent development organisations in the world. It also embodies values that other programmes cannot offer: recipient agency, the absence of paternalism, and an approach that places decision-making in the hands of the people concerned.
| GiveDirectly | AMF / Helen Keller Intl | |
|---|---|---|
| Level of evidence | Very high (hundreds of studies) | Very high (randomised controlled trials) |
| Cost-effectiveness per GiveWell | Solid, 30–40% of top charities' level | Among the best known interventions |
| Recipient agency | Complete: recipients decide | Limited: intervention defined in advance |
| Tax relief from France | Not available | Yes, via Mieux Donner |
The interventions that dominate philanthropic recommendations today — distributing bed nets, administering vitamin A, vaccinating infants — are responses to problems that should, in time, be addressed at scale through public policy. Once these basic but fundamental solutions have been widely deployed, the question will be: what comes next for the hundreds of millions of people still living in extreme poverty?
Unconditional cash transfers are a serious answer to that question. They can be deployed at scale, across very different contexts, with manageable operational costs. GiveDirectly estimates it can deliver up to $1.4 billion in transfers between 2025 and 2027.[6] Beyond NGOs, international development agencies should probably allocate a far greater share of their aid budgets to direct cash transfers. It is a direction that gains credibility as the evidence accumulates.
If you wish to support GiveDirectly from France, you can do so directly on the organisation's website. However, you will not be able to claim a tax reduction on that donation. No French intermediary currently enables donations to be directed towards GiveDirectly with the issuance of a tax receipt.
In France, the tax reduction on donations is reserved for associations or foundations that pursue a goal of general public interest. Based on conversations we have had with actors in the sector, it appears that the tax authorities interpret this condition in a restrictive way: an organisation whose principal activity consists in redistributing money directly to individuals — even those living in extreme poverty — would not satisfy this definition.
This interpretation is debatable on its merits. Transferring resources directly to people living on less than $2 a day is, in every sense of the term, an act in the general public interest. But for as long as the legal interpretation does not evolve, organisations that redistribute money directly to individual beneficiaries will continue to face this barrier.
Until recently, it was possible to donate to GiveDirectly UK via the Transnational Giving Europe (TGE) mechanism — a network of European foundations that facilitates cross-border donations with a local tax receipt. The Fondation de France was the French partner in this network.
That channel is no longer available. The Fondation de France declined to renew GiveDirectly's dossier within the TGE framework. Based on our understanding, the reason cited is explicitly their activity of redistributing money directly to individuals or families, considered as benefiting a restricted group of recipients.
The Fondation de France therefore concluded that GiveDirectly's very model — redistributing money directly to households selected according to the organisation's own criteria — was incompatible with the requirements it must meet vis-à-vis the French tax authorities.
If your goal is to have an impact on extreme poverty whilst benefiting from a tax reduction, several options are available through Mieux Donner. Organisations such as Against Malaria Foundation and Helen Keller International have demonstrated very high impact on the poorest populations, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, and enable donors in France to give with a tax receipt.
These organisations do not share GiveDirectly's model: they fund specific interventions rather than direct transfers. But they share the same commitment to evidential rigour and the maximisation of impact per euro donated.
Discover the charities recommended by Mieux Donner to help people in extreme poverty, with a tax receipt from France.
See the recommended charitiesSources
