Radical Trust and Unconditional Cash Transfers: What Donors and Nonprofits Need to Know
Radical Trust and Unconditional Cash Transfers: What Donors and Nonprofits Need to Know
Radical Trust and Unconditional Cash Transfers: What Donors and Nonprofits Need to Know
01 Dec 2025
01 Dec 2025
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What if the most effective thing you could do about extreme poverty was also the simplest: send money, with no strings attached, and trust people to decide what to do with it?
That’s the idea behind unconditional cash transfers, and it sits at the heart of GiveDirectly’s model. Instead of designing long lists of activities, conditions and indicators, GiveDirectly identifies very poor households and wires them relatively large, one-off payments (often around $1,000) via mobile money. People then choose: a new roof, school fees, livestock, a motorbike, stocked shelves for a kiosk, medical care, or debt repayment.
Over the last decade, randomized evaluations and large-scale studies have found that these unconditional cash transfers increase assets, incomes and psychological well-being, and can stimulate local economies, often without the feared blow-up in alcohol spending or inflation. For donors, nonprofits and startup founders, that creates a new baseline: if your project costs $X per household, can it beat simply giving people the money? This article explores how radical trust plus unconditional cash works in practice, what the evidence says, and how you can use cash as a benchmark, or even as a core part of your own funding model.
What Are Unconditional Cash Transfers, Really?
At its simplest, unconditional cash transfers are payments given to people in poverty without requiring them to do anything specific in return. There are no conditions like “you must attend training,” “show up at the clinic,” or “prove how you spent every cent.” Eligibility is usually based on need and context (for example, living below a certain income line, being in a crisis-affected area, or using proxies like thatched roofs in rural Kenya) rather than compliance.
Transfers can be one-off lump sums or smaller recurring payments. One-off transfers (like GiveDirectly’s typical $1,000) are large enough to change a household’s assets; a metal roof, livestock, a motorbike for income generation, or a set of school fees. Recurring transfers function more like a temporary income floor, helping households smooth consumption, avoid high-interest debt, and plan for the future.
Globally, governments and NGOs have quietly scaled up unconditional cash in recent years. A 2022 Cochrane review of cash programs in low- and middle-income countries found that unconditional cash transfers reduce the likelihood of extreme poverty and improve food security and diet diversity, with additional benefits for health in many settings. Major humanitarian actors like UNICEF now use unconditional cash to support families in crises, explicitly citing dignity and parental choice as core reasons: no one is better placed than a caregiver to know what their family needs next.
In other words, unconditional cash transfers are not a thought experiment anymore. They are a mainstream tool, and, increasingly, a benchmark for what good aid should at least be able to match.
Inside GiveDirectly’s Radical-Trust Model
GiveDirectly builds its whole operation around one simple idea: if you want to help people in poverty, start by trusting them with cash. The organisation works mainly in countries like Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Malawi and others in the Global South, plus newer programmes in places like Liberia, DRC and Morocco. More recently, it has also run large cash programmes in the United States.
The delivery chain is deliberately lean:
Targeting extreme poverty
Teams use publicly available data to find very poor areas.
Within villages, simple criteria (like living in a mud house with a thatched roof) are used to identify eligible households, which has proven to be a strong proxy for poverty in rural Kenya and Uganda.
Enrolment & consent
Households are visited, informed, and consent is obtained.
Basic checks help prevent fraud or elite capture without demanding complex paperwork from recipients.
Digital payments via mobile money
Transfers are sent through platforms like M-Pesa.
Recipients get SMS alerts, then cash out at local agents or use digital payments directly.
Unconditional use
There are no spending rules. Recipients decide whether to prioritise food, housing, schooling, health or small businesses.
Monitoring focuses on impact and fraud prevention, not policing day-to-day choices.
How This Differs from Traditional NGO Models
Most traditional programmes in the Global South still revolve around in-kind aid and conditions: giving livestock plus a training, offering food parcels, subsidising seeds, or funding school stipends conditional on attendance. These can work, but they come with high design and overhead costs—and often assume the NGO understands a household’s priorities better than the household does.
GiveDirectly flips that logic:
Dimension | GiveDirectly-style cash | Traditional, in-kind & conditional |
|---|---|---|
Resource type | Unconditional cash transfers via mobile money | Goods/services (food, training, assets) |
Role of recipients | Primary decision-makers on spending | “Beneficiaries” expected to follow programme rules |
Conditions | None or minimal | Often tied to behaviours (attendance, check-ups, asset use) |
Evidence approach | Heavy use of RCTs, cash as benchmark | Evaluation often output-focused; rarely benchmarks against cash |
Local economy impact | Documented positive spillovers & multipliers | Mixed: can support or distort markets |
For donors and NPOs, this is a radical-trust model in action: do a few things exceptionally well (targeting, transfer, fraud prevention) and push decision power to households.
What the Evidence Says – Do Unconditional Cash Transfers Work?
The short answer is: yes, unconditional cash transfers work, and we now have a large body of evidence to support that claim.
One of the best-known early randomized trials, run with GiveDirectly in rural Kenya, found that a large one-time cash transfer:
increased household assets (especially durable goods and livestock),
improved food security and consumption,
and boosted psychological well-being, including reduced stress and depression, nine months after transfers.
A follow-up three years later found that asset gains persisted, even after the initial boost to consumption had faded. People did not blow the money on “temptation goods” at scale, alcohol and tobacco spending remained modest.
More recently, one of the world’s largest cash studies looked at a programme giving roughly $1,000 to over 10,000 poor households in rural Kenya. The result: each $1 of transfers generated about $2.5 in local economic activity, with no significant inflation.
Beyond East Africa, we now see similar patterns:
In the United States, a J-PAL-supported evaluation of $1,000 monthly unconditional cash for low-income individuals found large increases in spending on essentials like housing, food and transport, and improvements in financial stability.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, New York’s public hospital system partnered with philanthropy on an unconditional cash programme for economically stressed patients, delivering $1,000 payments that addressed urgent needs faster than traditional social services.
From a donor perspective, organisations like GiveWell now treat unconditional cash transfers as a reference point for cost-effectiveness. In 2024 they re-analysed GiveDirectly’s flagship programme and concluded it is 3–4× more cost-effective than they had previously estimated, while still benchmarking it against their very top life-saving charities.
The bottom line: unconditional cash transfers don’t just “feel good”; they hold up in rigorous trials and increasingly look like a solid, evidence-backed floor for what any poverty-focused intervention should beat.
Stories from Rural Communities – What People Actually Do with Cash
Data is crucial, but stories make radical trust real.
In rural Kenya, women like Claris Pendo and Samini Kazungu received unconditional cash transfers equivalent to a few hundred US dollars. One invested in livestock, improving her family’s food security and allowing her to leave dangerous, low-paid charcoal work. Another, after a traumatic stillbirth, used the money to pay for postnatal treatment she otherwise could not afford, while also buying essentials, land and a motorcycle to generate income.
These stories echo patterns found in GiveDirectly’s own case studies and RCT follow-ups:
Some households fix the basics first (food, debt, school fees, medical bills).
Others make lumpy investments: a better roof, solar power, livestock, a motorbike taxi, a stocked kiosk.
Local shopkeepers and service providers report higher sales as transfer recipients spend money in nearby markets, helping neighbours as well as themselves.
“Unconditional” here does not mean “unthinking.” Households are doing the same hard prioritisation work that donors and NGOs do in conference rooms, but with far better local information. For example:
A family might choose to rebuild a leaking roof instead of buying a cow, because their children’s health and sleep matter most right now.
A refugee household in Uganda might use cash differently from a host community family, say, building a small business to reduce dependence on aid, yet both end up better off.
For nonprofits and startups, these stories are not just feel-good anecdotes. They’re a design signal: when people are trusted with cash, they often reveal priorities your programme never would have guessed.
enjoying this Free resource?
Get all of my actionable checklists, templates, and case studies.
Why Radical Trust Beats Micromanagement for Donors
If you’re a donor, unconditional cash transfers may feel almost too simple. Where’s the theory of change diagram? The training manual? The ribbon-cutting photo?
Here’s why radical trust plus unconditional cash can be a smart move:
Agency and dignity
Unconditional cash transfers treat people as partners, not projects. This aligns closely with the principles of trust-based philanthropy, which emphasise unrestricted funding and power-sharing with communities.Efficiency and low overhead
Sending digital cash via mobile money avoids the costs of shipping goods, maintaining warehouses, or running large field teams to monitor behaviour. This is exactly why GiveDirectly and other cash-first actors can keep their overhead comparatively lean while still investing in rigorous evaluation.Evidence you can actually read
Because unconditional cash transfers are relatively simple, it’s easier to evaluate them rigorously. J-PAL, IPA, Cochrane and others have built a substantial evidence base showing that unconditional cash can raise incomes, reduce poverty and improve mental health across multiple contexts.Local economic multipliers
Rather than crowding out local markets, well-designed cash programmes often boost nearby businesses. The Kenyan study finding a ~2.5× GDP multiplier per dollar transferred is a strong example: cash circulated through shops, services and small enterprises, creating benefits even for non-recipients.A clear benchmark for giving
Perhaps most importantly, unconditional cash transfers give you a transparent “floor” for your philanthropy. If another charity can’t show that its programme does more good per dollar than simply giving cash to people in poverty, that’s a useful decision signal.
As a donor, you don’t have to fund only cash. But you can decide that unconditional cash transfers are your default high-impact option, and other grants must make a clear case for why they beat that baseline.
Using Cash as Your Nonprofit Benchmark
For nonprofits and social startups, unconditional cash transfers can feel threatening: a clean, simple alternative that might outshine more complex programmes. A healthier stance is to use cash as a benchmark, not a rival.
Here are four practical lessons you can borrow from the GiveDirectly model and the wider cash evidence:
1. Start with a Cash Benchmark
Before launching or renewing any programme, ask:
“If we spent this budget on unconditional cash transfers to our target group, what would the impact likely be?”
You can roughly answer that by using public cost-effectiveness analyses from evaluators like GiveWell and global evidence summaries on unconditional cash transfers.
If your new idea can’t plausibly outperform unconditional cash transfers on key outcomes (income, health, wellbeing, etc.), that doesn’t automatically mean you shouldn’t do it, but it does mean you should be honest about why you’re choosing a more complex route.
2. Loosen Conditions Where You Can
The evidence that households generally spend wisely weakens the case for strict conditionality in many settings, especially where externalities are limited.
You can experiment with:
simpler eligibility rules,
light-touch reporting instead of heavy compliance checks,
and more flexible, partially unrestricted grants to local partners.
Reserve strict conditions for cases where there is a clear externality (for example, vaccine uptake or public health measures) that unconditional cash transfers alone cannot address.
3. Treat Programmes as Hypotheses, Not Dogmas
GiveDirectly has worked closely with independent researchers, sharing data and publishing results, even when they’re modest or mixed.
You can adopt the same mindset:
Build experimental or quasi-experimental designs into new programmes.
Pre-commit to publish results in some form.
Be explicit: “This is our hypothesis; here’s how we’ll know if it beats unconditional cash transfers.”
4. Redesign Relationships with Communities
Radical trust implies co-creation, not just consultation. Instead of arriving with a pre-packaged solution, start with:
“If you had flexible funding equivalent to [X], what would you do?”
You may still end up funding services or infrastructure, but they’ll be anchored in community priorities, not donor assumptions. This mirrors the ethos of trust-based philanthropy, which emphasises multi-year flexible funding and shared decision-making.
Designing Cash-Like Programs – Practical Steps for NPOs and Startups
Maybe you’re not ready to become the next GiveDirectly, but you want to pilot cash-like approaches in your work. Here’s a simple roadmap.
Step 1 – Clarify Your Goal and Constraints
Ask:
What outcome do we care most about (income, food security, maternal health, education)?
What legal and regulatory constraints apply to cash in our context?
How much risk tolerance do our board and funders have?
In some settings (for example, maternal and child health), recent work has shown that unconditional cash transfers to pregnant people can significantly reduce infant mortality and improve health outcomes, making them a strong candidate for pilots.
Step 2 – Choose the Right Cash Modality
Options include:
One-off lump sums to kick-start asset building or business investments.
Recurring unconditional cash transfers for a defined period to stabilise income.
Hybrid models, where part of a grant is unconditional and part is tied to specific co-designed goals.
Look at digital rails already in use (mobile money, e-wallets, or local payment agents) to keep delivery costs low and traceable.
Step 3 – Start Small, Measure Hard
Launch a small, well-evaluated pilot before going big:
Randomize who receives unconditional cash transfers if ethically feasible, or compare to a credible comparison group.
Track not just direct outcomes for recipients, but spillovers on neighbours and local businesses.
Budget for independent monitoring to reduce fraud and build confidence.
Step 4 – Communicate with Radical Transparency
Cash pilots can trigger scepticism: “Won’t people waste it?” “Isn’t this too easy?”
Respond by:
sharing your targeting criteria, costs and results openly,
publishing both successes and things you’d change,
and explaining clearly why you chose unconditional cash transfers (or cash-like funding) over more traditional inputs.
If you’d like a partner to think through that first cash-benchmarked programme or startup concept, you can explicitly invite readers to reach out to you for early-stage design support and sense-checking.
Key Takeaways for Donors and Nonprofits
Unconditional cash transfers are now a proven, mainstream tool, with strong evidence that they increase incomes, assets and well-being and can boost local economies.
GiveDirectly’s radical-trust model focuses on a lean delivery chain, identifying very poor households and delivering large, unconditional cash transfers via mobile money, while letting people decide how to use the funds.
The best data we have suggests people do not systematically waste unconditional cash transfers; instead they prioritise food, housing, health, education and income-generating assets.
For donors, unconditional cash transfers offer a clear benchmark: if another programme can’t show why it beats straightforward cash, that’s an important decision signal.
For nonprofits and startups, using cash as a benchmark doesn’t mean abandoning your model. It means designing with humility, loosening unnecessary conditions, and asking communities what they would do with flexible funding.
You don’t need to choose between radical-trust cash and everything else. You can weave unconditional cash transfers into your toolkit, especially where needs and priorities differ widely between households.
Conclusion: Start from Cash, Then Build Up
Unconditional cash transfers are not a silver bullet, but they change the starting point for serious work on poverty. Over the past decade, organisations like GiveDirectly and a growing body of researchers have shown that simply giving people money and trusting them is not naive, it’s often one of the most effective, dignified and economically powerful things we can do. For donors, this makes unconditional cash transfers a compelling default: a way to act now, backed by evidence, while raising the bar for every more complex programme that asks for your support.
For nonprofits and startups, radical trust doesn’t mean abandoning creativity or sector expertise. It means designing with communities, testing whether your ideas can truly beat a cash benchmark, and being transparent about what you learn along the way. Some of the most exciting innovations in the Global South, like large-scale cash for rural villages, refugee settlements, or entire districts funded by philanthropies such as the Canva Foundation, are showing what happens when we combine digital rails, rigorous evaluation and deep trust in people’s own plans.
If you’re a donor, one next step is simple: make unconditional cash transfers part of your portfolio, for example by giving to GiveDirectly or similar programmes, and ask other grantees how they compare. If you’re an NPO or founder, consider piloting a cash-benchmarked or cash-like programme, and (if it helps) reach out for external sparring on the early design. In a world where money and attention are both scarce, starting from cash, then building up, might be the most honest way to honour the people you’re trying to serve.
Unconditional Cash Transfers: Common Questions Answered
1) Will people waste unconditional cash transfers on alcohol or “temptation goods”?
This concern comes up a lot, but it isn’t supported by the bulk of the evidence. Large reviews of unconditional cash transfers and specific trials with GiveDirectly in Kenya found little to no increase in spending on alcohol or tobacco, while spending on food, housing, assets and education rose substantially. People living in poverty know exactly how thin their margins are; when they receive a windfall, most use it to stabilise and invest, not to self-sabotage.
2) How do unconditional cash transfers affect local prices and markets?
In well-designed programmes like GiveDirectly’s, local inflation has been limited, even when transfers are relatively large. The Kenyan study that gave around $1,000 per household found that each dollar generated about 2.5 dollars in local economic activity without major price spikes. That’s because money circulates through local shops, services and labour, expanding the pie rather than just bidding up prices. Poorly designed programmes that dump goods into local markets can distort prices more than cash does.
3) Are unconditional cash transfers only suitable for the Global South?
No. While GiveDirectly began in rural East Africa, unconditional cash transfers are now being tested and used in high-income countries as well. In the US, cash trials providing $1,000 monthly to low-income individuals showed significant improvements in financial stability and health-related behaviours. J-PAL +2 J-PAL +2 New York’s public hospital system has deployed unconditional cash to patients facing pandemic-related hardship, and city-level pilots have targeted families with young children. The underlying logic (trust, flexibility, respect) is not bound to geography.
4) When are unconditional cash transfers not the right tool?
Unconditional cash transfers are powerful, but they’re not ideal for every challenge. Situations that involve strong externalities or public goods (such as vaccine campaigns, sanitation infrastructure or some environmental interventions) still require coordinated action beyond household spending. In fragile or conflict settings without functioning markets, cash might need to be combined with in-kind support. The key is to treat unconditional cash transfers as a default benchmark, then ask: “What specific problem are we solving that cash alone cannot?” If you can answer that clearly, you’re on solid ground.
What if the most effective thing you could do about extreme poverty was also the simplest: send money, with no strings attached, and trust people to decide what to do with it?
That’s the idea behind unconditional cash transfers, and it sits at the heart of GiveDirectly’s model. Instead of designing long lists of activities, conditions and indicators, GiveDirectly identifies very poor households and wires them relatively large, one-off payments (often around $1,000) via mobile money. People then choose: a new roof, school fees, livestock, a motorbike, stocked shelves for a kiosk, medical care, or debt repayment.
Over the last decade, randomized evaluations and large-scale studies have found that these unconditional cash transfers increase assets, incomes and psychological well-being, and can stimulate local economies, often without the feared blow-up in alcohol spending or inflation. For donors, nonprofits and startup founders, that creates a new baseline: if your project costs $X per household, can it beat simply giving people the money? This article explores how radical trust plus unconditional cash works in practice, what the evidence says, and how you can use cash as a benchmark, or even as a core part of your own funding model.
What Are Unconditional Cash Transfers, Really?
At its simplest, unconditional cash transfers are payments given to people in poverty without requiring them to do anything specific in return. There are no conditions like “you must attend training,” “show up at the clinic,” or “prove how you spent every cent.” Eligibility is usually based on need and context (for example, living below a certain income line, being in a crisis-affected area, or using proxies like thatched roofs in rural Kenya) rather than compliance.
Transfers can be one-off lump sums or smaller recurring payments. One-off transfers (like GiveDirectly’s typical $1,000) are large enough to change a household’s assets; a metal roof, livestock, a motorbike for income generation, or a set of school fees. Recurring transfers function more like a temporary income floor, helping households smooth consumption, avoid high-interest debt, and plan for the future.
Globally, governments and NGOs have quietly scaled up unconditional cash in recent years. A 2022 Cochrane review of cash programs in low- and middle-income countries found that unconditional cash transfers reduce the likelihood of extreme poverty and improve food security and diet diversity, with additional benefits for health in many settings. Major humanitarian actors like UNICEF now use unconditional cash to support families in crises, explicitly citing dignity and parental choice as core reasons: no one is better placed than a caregiver to know what their family needs next.
In other words, unconditional cash transfers are not a thought experiment anymore. They are a mainstream tool, and, increasingly, a benchmark for what good aid should at least be able to match.
Inside GiveDirectly’s Radical-Trust Model
GiveDirectly builds its whole operation around one simple idea: if you want to help people in poverty, start by trusting them with cash. The organisation works mainly in countries like Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Malawi and others in the Global South, plus newer programmes in places like Liberia, DRC and Morocco. More recently, it has also run large cash programmes in the United States.
The delivery chain is deliberately lean:
Targeting extreme poverty
Teams use publicly available data to find very poor areas.
Within villages, simple criteria (like living in a mud house with a thatched roof) are used to identify eligible households, which has proven to be a strong proxy for poverty in rural Kenya and Uganda.
Enrolment & consent
Households are visited, informed, and consent is obtained.
Basic checks help prevent fraud or elite capture without demanding complex paperwork from recipients.
Digital payments via mobile money
Transfers are sent through platforms like M-Pesa.
Recipients get SMS alerts, then cash out at local agents or use digital payments directly.
Unconditional use
There are no spending rules. Recipients decide whether to prioritise food, housing, schooling, health or small businesses.
Monitoring focuses on impact and fraud prevention, not policing day-to-day choices.
How This Differs from Traditional NGO Models
Most traditional programmes in the Global South still revolve around in-kind aid and conditions: giving livestock plus a training, offering food parcels, subsidising seeds, or funding school stipends conditional on attendance. These can work, but they come with high design and overhead costs—and often assume the NGO understands a household’s priorities better than the household does.
GiveDirectly flips that logic:
Dimension | GiveDirectly-style cash | Traditional, in-kind & conditional |
|---|---|---|
Resource type | Unconditional cash transfers via mobile money | Goods/services (food, training, assets) |
Role of recipients | Primary decision-makers on spending | “Beneficiaries” expected to follow programme rules |
Conditions | None or minimal | Often tied to behaviours (attendance, check-ups, asset use) |
Evidence approach | Heavy use of RCTs, cash as benchmark | Evaluation often output-focused; rarely benchmarks against cash |
Local economy impact | Documented positive spillovers & multipliers | Mixed: can support or distort markets |
For donors and NPOs, this is a radical-trust model in action: do a few things exceptionally well (targeting, transfer, fraud prevention) and push decision power to households.
What the Evidence Says – Do Unconditional Cash Transfers Work?
The short answer is: yes, unconditional cash transfers work, and we now have a large body of evidence to support that claim.
One of the best-known early randomized trials, run with GiveDirectly in rural Kenya, found that a large one-time cash transfer:
increased household assets (especially durable goods and livestock),
improved food security and consumption,
and boosted psychological well-being, including reduced stress and depression, nine months after transfers.
A follow-up three years later found that asset gains persisted, even after the initial boost to consumption had faded. People did not blow the money on “temptation goods” at scale, alcohol and tobacco spending remained modest.
More recently, one of the world’s largest cash studies looked at a programme giving roughly $1,000 to over 10,000 poor households in rural Kenya. The result: each $1 of transfers generated about $2.5 in local economic activity, with no significant inflation.
Beyond East Africa, we now see similar patterns:
In the United States, a J-PAL-supported evaluation of $1,000 monthly unconditional cash for low-income individuals found large increases in spending on essentials like housing, food and transport, and improvements in financial stability.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, New York’s public hospital system partnered with philanthropy on an unconditional cash programme for economically stressed patients, delivering $1,000 payments that addressed urgent needs faster than traditional social services.
From a donor perspective, organisations like GiveWell now treat unconditional cash transfers as a reference point for cost-effectiveness. In 2024 they re-analysed GiveDirectly’s flagship programme and concluded it is 3–4× more cost-effective than they had previously estimated, while still benchmarking it against their very top life-saving charities.
The bottom line: unconditional cash transfers don’t just “feel good”; they hold up in rigorous trials and increasingly look like a solid, evidence-backed floor for what any poverty-focused intervention should beat.
Stories from Rural Communities – What People Actually Do with Cash
Data is crucial, but stories make radical trust real.
In rural Kenya, women like Claris Pendo and Samini Kazungu received unconditional cash transfers equivalent to a few hundred US dollars. One invested in livestock, improving her family’s food security and allowing her to leave dangerous, low-paid charcoal work. Another, after a traumatic stillbirth, used the money to pay for postnatal treatment she otherwise could not afford, while also buying essentials, land and a motorcycle to generate income.
These stories echo patterns found in GiveDirectly’s own case studies and RCT follow-ups:
Some households fix the basics first (food, debt, school fees, medical bills).
Others make lumpy investments: a better roof, solar power, livestock, a motorbike taxi, a stocked kiosk.
Local shopkeepers and service providers report higher sales as transfer recipients spend money in nearby markets, helping neighbours as well as themselves.
“Unconditional” here does not mean “unthinking.” Households are doing the same hard prioritisation work that donors and NGOs do in conference rooms, but with far better local information. For example:
A family might choose to rebuild a leaking roof instead of buying a cow, because their children’s health and sleep matter most right now.
A refugee household in Uganda might use cash differently from a host community family, say, building a small business to reduce dependence on aid, yet both end up better off.
For nonprofits and startups, these stories are not just feel-good anecdotes. They’re a design signal: when people are trusted with cash, they often reveal priorities your programme never would have guessed.
enjoying this Free resource?
Get all of my actionable checklists, templates, and case studies.
Why Radical Trust Beats Micromanagement for Donors
If you’re a donor, unconditional cash transfers may feel almost too simple. Where’s the theory of change diagram? The training manual? The ribbon-cutting photo?
Here’s why radical trust plus unconditional cash can be a smart move:
Agency and dignity
Unconditional cash transfers treat people as partners, not projects. This aligns closely with the principles of trust-based philanthropy, which emphasise unrestricted funding and power-sharing with communities.Efficiency and low overhead
Sending digital cash via mobile money avoids the costs of shipping goods, maintaining warehouses, or running large field teams to monitor behaviour. This is exactly why GiveDirectly and other cash-first actors can keep their overhead comparatively lean while still investing in rigorous evaluation.Evidence you can actually read
Because unconditional cash transfers are relatively simple, it’s easier to evaluate them rigorously. J-PAL, IPA, Cochrane and others have built a substantial evidence base showing that unconditional cash can raise incomes, reduce poverty and improve mental health across multiple contexts.Local economic multipliers
Rather than crowding out local markets, well-designed cash programmes often boost nearby businesses. The Kenyan study finding a ~2.5× GDP multiplier per dollar transferred is a strong example: cash circulated through shops, services and small enterprises, creating benefits even for non-recipients.A clear benchmark for giving
Perhaps most importantly, unconditional cash transfers give you a transparent “floor” for your philanthropy. If another charity can’t show that its programme does more good per dollar than simply giving cash to people in poverty, that’s a useful decision signal.
As a donor, you don’t have to fund only cash. But you can decide that unconditional cash transfers are your default high-impact option, and other grants must make a clear case for why they beat that baseline.
Using Cash as Your Nonprofit Benchmark
For nonprofits and social startups, unconditional cash transfers can feel threatening: a clean, simple alternative that might outshine more complex programmes. A healthier stance is to use cash as a benchmark, not a rival.
Here are four practical lessons you can borrow from the GiveDirectly model and the wider cash evidence:
1. Start with a Cash Benchmark
Before launching or renewing any programme, ask:
“If we spent this budget on unconditional cash transfers to our target group, what would the impact likely be?”
You can roughly answer that by using public cost-effectiveness analyses from evaluators like GiveWell and global evidence summaries on unconditional cash transfers.
If your new idea can’t plausibly outperform unconditional cash transfers on key outcomes (income, health, wellbeing, etc.), that doesn’t automatically mean you shouldn’t do it, but it does mean you should be honest about why you’re choosing a more complex route.
2. Loosen Conditions Where You Can
The evidence that households generally spend wisely weakens the case for strict conditionality in many settings, especially where externalities are limited.
You can experiment with:
simpler eligibility rules,
light-touch reporting instead of heavy compliance checks,
and more flexible, partially unrestricted grants to local partners.
Reserve strict conditions for cases where there is a clear externality (for example, vaccine uptake or public health measures) that unconditional cash transfers alone cannot address.
3. Treat Programmes as Hypotheses, Not Dogmas
GiveDirectly has worked closely with independent researchers, sharing data and publishing results, even when they’re modest or mixed.
You can adopt the same mindset:
Build experimental or quasi-experimental designs into new programmes.
Pre-commit to publish results in some form.
Be explicit: “This is our hypothesis; here’s how we’ll know if it beats unconditional cash transfers.”
4. Redesign Relationships with Communities
Radical trust implies co-creation, not just consultation. Instead of arriving with a pre-packaged solution, start with:
“If you had flexible funding equivalent to [X], what would you do?”
You may still end up funding services or infrastructure, but they’ll be anchored in community priorities, not donor assumptions. This mirrors the ethos of trust-based philanthropy, which emphasises multi-year flexible funding and shared decision-making.
Designing Cash-Like Programs – Practical Steps for NPOs and Startups
Maybe you’re not ready to become the next GiveDirectly, but you want to pilot cash-like approaches in your work. Here’s a simple roadmap.
Step 1 – Clarify Your Goal and Constraints
Ask:
What outcome do we care most about (income, food security, maternal health, education)?
What legal and regulatory constraints apply to cash in our context?
How much risk tolerance do our board and funders have?
In some settings (for example, maternal and child health), recent work has shown that unconditional cash transfers to pregnant people can significantly reduce infant mortality and improve health outcomes, making them a strong candidate for pilots.
Step 2 – Choose the Right Cash Modality
Options include:
One-off lump sums to kick-start asset building or business investments.
Recurring unconditional cash transfers for a defined period to stabilise income.
Hybrid models, where part of a grant is unconditional and part is tied to specific co-designed goals.
Look at digital rails already in use (mobile money, e-wallets, or local payment agents) to keep delivery costs low and traceable.
Step 3 – Start Small, Measure Hard
Launch a small, well-evaluated pilot before going big:
Randomize who receives unconditional cash transfers if ethically feasible, or compare to a credible comparison group.
Track not just direct outcomes for recipients, but spillovers on neighbours and local businesses.
Budget for independent monitoring to reduce fraud and build confidence.
Step 4 – Communicate with Radical Transparency
Cash pilots can trigger scepticism: “Won’t people waste it?” “Isn’t this too easy?”
Respond by:
sharing your targeting criteria, costs and results openly,
publishing both successes and things you’d change,
and explaining clearly why you chose unconditional cash transfers (or cash-like funding) over more traditional inputs.
If you’d like a partner to think through that first cash-benchmarked programme or startup concept, you can explicitly invite readers to reach out to you for early-stage design support and sense-checking.
Key Takeaways for Donors and Nonprofits
Unconditional cash transfers are now a proven, mainstream tool, with strong evidence that they increase incomes, assets and well-being and can boost local economies.
GiveDirectly’s radical-trust model focuses on a lean delivery chain, identifying very poor households and delivering large, unconditional cash transfers via mobile money, while letting people decide how to use the funds.
The best data we have suggests people do not systematically waste unconditional cash transfers; instead they prioritise food, housing, health, education and income-generating assets.
For donors, unconditional cash transfers offer a clear benchmark: if another programme can’t show why it beats straightforward cash, that’s an important decision signal.
For nonprofits and startups, using cash as a benchmark doesn’t mean abandoning your model. It means designing with humility, loosening unnecessary conditions, and asking communities what they would do with flexible funding.
You don’t need to choose between radical-trust cash and everything else. You can weave unconditional cash transfers into your toolkit, especially where needs and priorities differ widely between households.
Conclusion: Start from Cash, Then Build Up
Unconditional cash transfers are not a silver bullet, but they change the starting point for serious work on poverty. Over the past decade, organisations like GiveDirectly and a growing body of researchers have shown that simply giving people money and trusting them is not naive, it’s often one of the most effective, dignified and economically powerful things we can do. For donors, this makes unconditional cash transfers a compelling default: a way to act now, backed by evidence, while raising the bar for every more complex programme that asks for your support.
For nonprofits and startups, radical trust doesn’t mean abandoning creativity or sector expertise. It means designing with communities, testing whether your ideas can truly beat a cash benchmark, and being transparent about what you learn along the way. Some of the most exciting innovations in the Global South, like large-scale cash for rural villages, refugee settlements, or entire districts funded by philanthropies such as the Canva Foundation, are showing what happens when we combine digital rails, rigorous evaluation and deep trust in people’s own plans.
If you’re a donor, one next step is simple: make unconditional cash transfers part of your portfolio, for example by giving to GiveDirectly or similar programmes, and ask other grantees how they compare. If you’re an NPO or founder, consider piloting a cash-benchmarked or cash-like programme, and (if it helps) reach out for external sparring on the early design. In a world where money and attention are both scarce, starting from cash, then building up, might be the most honest way to honour the people you’re trying to serve.
Unconditional Cash Transfers: Common Questions Answered
1) Will people waste unconditional cash transfers on alcohol or “temptation goods”?
This concern comes up a lot, but it isn’t supported by the bulk of the evidence. Large reviews of unconditional cash transfers and specific trials with GiveDirectly in Kenya found little to no increase in spending on alcohol or tobacco, while spending on food, housing, assets and education rose substantially. People living in poverty know exactly how thin their margins are; when they receive a windfall, most use it to stabilise and invest, not to self-sabotage.
2) How do unconditional cash transfers affect local prices and markets?
In well-designed programmes like GiveDirectly’s, local inflation has been limited, even when transfers are relatively large. The Kenyan study that gave around $1,000 per household found that each dollar generated about 2.5 dollars in local economic activity without major price spikes. That’s because money circulates through local shops, services and labour, expanding the pie rather than just bidding up prices. Poorly designed programmes that dump goods into local markets can distort prices more than cash does.
3) Are unconditional cash transfers only suitable for the Global South?
No. While GiveDirectly began in rural East Africa, unconditional cash transfers are now being tested and used in high-income countries as well. In the US, cash trials providing $1,000 monthly to low-income individuals showed significant improvements in financial stability and health-related behaviours. J-PAL +2 J-PAL +2 New York’s public hospital system has deployed unconditional cash to patients facing pandemic-related hardship, and city-level pilots have targeted families with young children. The underlying logic (trust, flexibility, respect) is not bound to geography.
4) When are unconditional cash transfers not the right tool?
Unconditional cash transfers are powerful, but they’re not ideal for every challenge. Situations that involve strong externalities or public goods (such as vaccine campaigns, sanitation infrastructure or some environmental interventions) still require coordinated action beyond household spending. In fragile or conflict settings without functioning markets, cash might need to be combined with in-kind support. The key is to treat unconditional cash transfers as a default benchmark, then ask: “What specific problem are we solving that cash alone cannot?” If you can answer that clearly, you’re on solid ground.
What if the most effective thing you could do about extreme poverty was also the simplest: send money, with no strings attached, and trust people to decide what to do with it?
That’s the idea behind unconditional cash transfers, and it sits at the heart of GiveDirectly’s model. Instead of designing long lists of activities, conditions and indicators, GiveDirectly identifies very poor households and wires them relatively large, one-off payments (often around $1,000) via mobile money. People then choose: a new roof, school fees, livestock, a motorbike, stocked shelves for a kiosk, medical care, or debt repayment.
Over the last decade, randomized evaluations and large-scale studies have found that these unconditional cash transfers increase assets, incomes and psychological well-being, and can stimulate local economies, often without the feared blow-up in alcohol spending or inflation. For donors, nonprofits and startup founders, that creates a new baseline: if your project costs $X per household, can it beat simply giving people the money? This article explores how radical trust plus unconditional cash works in practice, what the evidence says, and how you can use cash as a benchmark, or even as a core part of your own funding model.
What Are Unconditional Cash Transfers, Really?
At its simplest, unconditional cash transfers are payments given to people in poverty without requiring them to do anything specific in return. There are no conditions like “you must attend training,” “show up at the clinic,” or “prove how you spent every cent.” Eligibility is usually based on need and context (for example, living below a certain income line, being in a crisis-affected area, or using proxies like thatched roofs in rural Kenya) rather than compliance.
Transfers can be one-off lump sums or smaller recurring payments. One-off transfers (like GiveDirectly’s typical $1,000) are large enough to change a household’s assets; a metal roof, livestock, a motorbike for income generation, or a set of school fees. Recurring transfers function more like a temporary income floor, helping households smooth consumption, avoid high-interest debt, and plan for the future.
Globally, governments and NGOs have quietly scaled up unconditional cash in recent years. A 2022 Cochrane review of cash programs in low- and middle-income countries found that unconditional cash transfers reduce the likelihood of extreme poverty and improve food security and diet diversity, with additional benefits for health in many settings. Major humanitarian actors like UNICEF now use unconditional cash to support families in crises, explicitly citing dignity and parental choice as core reasons: no one is better placed than a caregiver to know what their family needs next.
In other words, unconditional cash transfers are not a thought experiment anymore. They are a mainstream tool, and, increasingly, a benchmark for what good aid should at least be able to match.
Inside GiveDirectly’s Radical-Trust Model
GiveDirectly builds its whole operation around one simple idea: if you want to help people in poverty, start by trusting them with cash. The organisation works mainly in countries like Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Malawi and others in the Global South, plus newer programmes in places like Liberia, DRC and Morocco. More recently, it has also run large cash programmes in the United States.
The delivery chain is deliberately lean:
Targeting extreme poverty
Teams use publicly available data to find very poor areas.
Within villages, simple criteria (like living in a mud house with a thatched roof) are used to identify eligible households, which has proven to be a strong proxy for poverty in rural Kenya and Uganda.
Enrolment & consent
Households are visited, informed, and consent is obtained.
Basic checks help prevent fraud or elite capture without demanding complex paperwork from recipients.
Digital payments via mobile money
Transfers are sent through platforms like M-Pesa.
Recipients get SMS alerts, then cash out at local agents or use digital payments directly.
Unconditional use
There are no spending rules. Recipients decide whether to prioritise food, housing, schooling, health or small businesses.
Monitoring focuses on impact and fraud prevention, not policing day-to-day choices.
How This Differs from Traditional NGO Models
Most traditional programmes in the Global South still revolve around in-kind aid and conditions: giving livestock plus a training, offering food parcels, subsidising seeds, or funding school stipends conditional on attendance. These can work, but they come with high design and overhead costs—and often assume the NGO understands a household’s priorities better than the household does.
GiveDirectly flips that logic:
Dimension | GiveDirectly-style cash | Traditional, in-kind & conditional |
|---|---|---|
Resource type | Unconditional cash transfers via mobile money | Goods/services (food, training, assets) |
Role of recipients | Primary decision-makers on spending | “Beneficiaries” expected to follow programme rules |
Conditions | None or minimal | Often tied to behaviours (attendance, check-ups, asset use) |
Evidence approach | Heavy use of RCTs, cash as benchmark | Evaluation often output-focused; rarely benchmarks against cash |
Local economy impact | Documented positive spillovers & multipliers | Mixed: can support or distort markets |
For donors and NPOs, this is a radical-trust model in action: do a few things exceptionally well (targeting, transfer, fraud prevention) and push decision power to households.
What the Evidence Says – Do Unconditional Cash Transfers Work?
The short answer is: yes, unconditional cash transfers work, and we now have a large body of evidence to support that claim.
One of the best-known early randomized trials, run with GiveDirectly in rural Kenya, found that a large one-time cash transfer:
increased household assets (especially durable goods and livestock),
improved food security and consumption,
and boosted psychological well-being, including reduced stress and depression, nine months after transfers.
A follow-up three years later found that asset gains persisted, even after the initial boost to consumption had faded. People did not blow the money on “temptation goods” at scale, alcohol and tobacco spending remained modest.
More recently, one of the world’s largest cash studies looked at a programme giving roughly $1,000 to over 10,000 poor households in rural Kenya. The result: each $1 of transfers generated about $2.5 in local economic activity, with no significant inflation.
Beyond East Africa, we now see similar patterns:
In the United States, a J-PAL-supported evaluation of $1,000 monthly unconditional cash for low-income individuals found large increases in spending on essentials like housing, food and transport, and improvements in financial stability.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, New York’s public hospital system partnered with philanthropy on an unconditional cash programme for economically stressed patients, delivering $1,000 payments that addressed urgent needs faster than traditional social services.
From a donor perspective, organisations like GiveWell now treat unconditional cash transfers as a reference point for cost-effectiveness. In 2024 they re-analysed GiveDirectly’s flagship programme and concluded it is 3–4× more cost-effective than they had previously estimated, while still benchmarking it against their very top life-saving charities.
The bottom line: unconditional cash transfers don’t just “feel good”; they hold up in rigorous trials and increasingly look like a solid, evidence-backed floor for what any poverty-focused intervention should beat.
Stories from Rural Communities – What People Actually Do with Cash
Data is crucial, but stories make radical trust real.
In rural Kenya, women like Claris Pendo and Samini Kazungu received unconditional cash transfers equivalent to a few hundred US dollars. One invested in livestock, improving her family’s food security and allowing her to leave dangerous, low-paid charcoal work. Another, after a traumatic stillbirth, used the money to pay for postnatal treatment she otherwise could not afford, while also buying essentials, land and a motorcycle to generate income.
These stories echo patterns found in GiveDirectly’s own case studies and RCT follow-ups:
Some households fix the basics first (food, debt, school fees, medical bills).
Others make lumpy investments: a better roof, solar power, livestock, a motorbike taxi, a stocked kiosk.
Local shopkeepers and service providers report higher sales as transfer recipients spend money in nearby markets, helping neighbours as well as themselves.
“Unconditional” here does not mean “unthinking.” Households are doing the same hard prioritisation work that donors and NGOs do in conference rooms, but with far better local information. For example:
A family might choose to rebuild a leaking roof instead of buying a cow, because their children’s health and sleep matter most right now.
A refugee household in Uganda might use cash differently from a host community family, say, building a small business to reduce dependence on aid, yet both end up better off.
For nonprofits and startups, these stories are not just feel-good anecdotes. They’re a design signal: when people are trusted with cash, they often reveal priorities your programme never would have guessed.
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Why Radical Trust Beats Micromanagement for Donors
If you’re a donor, unconditional cash transfers may feel almost too simple. Where’s the theory of change diagram? The training manual? The ribbon-cutting photo?
Here’s why radical trust plus unconditional cash can be a smart move:
Agency and dignity
Unconditional cash transfers treat people as partners, not projects. This aligns closely with the principles of trust-based philanthropy, which emphasise unrestricted funding and power-sharing with communities.Efficiency and low overhead
Sending digital cash via mobile money avoids the costs of shipping goods, maintaining warehouses, or running large field teams to monitor behaviour. This is exactly why GiveDirectly and other cash-first actors can keep their overhead comparatively lean while still investing in rigorous evaluation.Evidence you can actually read
Because unconditional cash transfers are relatively simple, it’s easier to evaluate them rigorously. J-PAL, IPA, Cochrane and others have built a substantial evidence base showing that unconditional cash can raise incomes, reduce poverty and improve mental health across multiple contexts.Local economic multipliers
Rather than crowding out local markets, well-designed cash programmes often boost nearby businesses. The Kenyan study finding a ~2.5× GDP multiplier per dollar transferred is a strong example: cash circulated through shops, services and small enterprises, creating benefits even for non-recipients.A clear benchmark for giving
Perhaps most importantly, unconditional cash transfers give you a transparent “floor” for your philanthropy. If another charity can’t show that its programme does more good per dollar than simply giving cash to people in poverty, that’s a useful decision signal.
As a donor, you don’t have to fund only cash. But you can decide that unconditional cash transfers are your default high-impact option, and other grants must make a clear case for why they beat that baseline.
Using Cash as Your Nonprofit Benchmark
For nonprofits and social startups, unconditional cash transfers can feel threatening: a clean, simple alternative that might outshine more complex programmes. A healthier stance is to use cash as a benchmark, not a rival.
Here are four practical lessons you can borrow from the GiveDirectly model and the wider cash evidence:
1. Start with a Cash Benchmark
Before launching or renewing any programme, ask:
“If we spent this budget on unconditional cash transfers to our target group, what would the impact likely be?”
You can roughly answer that by using public cost-effectiveness analyses from evaluators like GiveWell and global evidence summaries on unconditional cash transfers.
If your new idea can’t plausibly outperform unconditional cash transfers on key outcomes (income, health, wellbeing, etc.), that doesn’t automatically mean you shouldn’t do it, but it does mean you should be honest about why you’re choosing a more complex route.
2. Loosen Conditions Where You Can
The evidence that households generally spend wisely weakens the case for strict conditionality in many settings, especially where externalities are limited.
You can experiment with:
simpler eligibility rules,
light-touch reporting instead of heavy compliance checks,
and more flexible, partially unrestricted grants to local partners.
Reserve strict conditions for cases where there is a clear externality (for example, vaccine uptake or public health measures) that unconditional cash transfers alone cannot address.
3. Treat Programmes as Hypotheses, Not Dogmas
GiveDirectly has worked closely with independent researchers, sharing data and publishing results, even when they’re modest or mixed.
You can adopt the same mindset:
Build experimental or quasi-experimental designs into new programmes.
Pre-commit to publish results in some form.
Be explicit: “This is our hypothesis; here’s how we’ll know if it beats unconditional cash transfers.”
4. Redesign Relationships with Communities
Radical trust implies co-creation, not just consultation. Instead of arriving with a pre-packaged solution, start with:
“If you had flexible funding equivalent to [X], what would you do?”
You may still end up funding services or infrastructure, but they’ll be anchored in community priorities, not donor assumptions. This mirrors the ethos of trust-based philanthropy, which emphasises multi-year flexible funding and shared decision-making.
Designing Cash-Like Programs – Practical Steps for NPOs and Startups
Maybe you’re not ready to become the next GiveDirectly, but you want to pilot cash-like approaches in your work. Here’s a simple roadmap.
Step 1 – Clarify Your Goal and Constraints
Ask:
What outcome do we care most about (income, food security, maternal health, education)?
What legal and regulatory constraints apply to cash in our context?
How much risk tolerance do our board and funders have?
In some settings (for example, maternal and child health), recent work has shown that unconditional cash transfers to pregnant people can significantly reduce infant mortality and improve health outcomes, making them a strong candidate for pilots.
Step 2 – Choose the Right Cash Modality
Options include:
One-off lump sums to kick-start asset building or business investments.
Recurring unconditional cash transfers for a defined period to stabilise income.
Hybrid models, where part of a grant is unconditional and part is tied to specific co-designed goals.
Look at digital rails already in use (mobile money, e-wallets, or local payment agents) to keep delivery costs low and traceable.
Step 3 – Start Small, Measure Hard
Launch a small, well-evaluated pilot before going big:
Randomize who receives unconditional cash transfers if ethically feasible, or compare to a credible comparison group.
Track not just direct outcomes for recipients, but spillovers on neighbours and local businesses.
Budget for independent monitoring to reduce fraud and build confidence.
Step 4 – Communicate with Radical Transparency
Cash pilots can trigger scepticism: “Won’t people waste it?” “Isn’t this too easy?”
Respond by:
sharing your targeting criteria, costs and results openly,
publishing both successes and things you’d change,
and explaining clearly why you chose unconditional cash transfers (or cash-like funding) over more traditional inputs.
If you’d like a partner to think through that first cash-benchmarked programme or startup concept, you can explicitly invite readers to reach out to you for early-stage design support and sense-checking.
Key Takeaways for Donors and Nonprofits
Unconditional cash transfers are now a proven, mainstream tool, with strong evidence that they increase incomes, assets and well-being and can boost local economies.
GiveDirectly’s radical-trust model focuses on a lean delivery chain, identifying very poor households and delivering large, unconditional cash transfers via mobile money, while letting people decide how to use the funds.
The best data we have suggests people do not systematically waste unconditional cash transfers; instead they prioritise food, housing, health, education and income-generating assets.
For donors, unconditional cash transfers offer a clear benchmark: if another programme can’t show why it beats straightforward cash, that’s an important decision signal.
For nonprofits and startups, using cash as a benchmark doesn’t mean abandoning your model. It means designing with humility, loosening unnecessary conditions, and asking communities what they would do with flexible funding.
You don’t need to choose between radical-trust cash and everything else. You can weave unconditional cash transfers into your toolkit, especially where needs and priorities differ widely between households.
Conclusion: Start from Cash, Then Build Up
Unconditional cash transfers are not a silver bullet, but they change the starting point for serious work on poverty. Over the past decade, organisations like GiveDirectly and a growing body of researchers have shown that simply giving people money and trusting them is not naive, it’s often one of the most effective, dignified and economically powerful things we can do. For donors, this makes unconditional cash transfers a compelling default: a way to act now, backed by evidence, while raising the bar for every more complex programme that asks for your support.
For nonprofits and startups, radical trust doesn’t mean abandoning creativity or sector expertise. It means designing with communities, testing whether your ideas can truly beat a cash benchmark, and being transparent about what you learn along the way. Some of the most exciting innovations in the Global South, like large-scale cash for rural villages, refugee settlements, or entire districts funded by philanthropies such as the Canva Foundation, are showing what happens when we combine digital rails, rigorous evaluation and deep trust in people’s own plans.
If you’re a donor, one next step is simple: make unconditional cash transfers part of your portfolio, for example by giving to GiveDirectly or similar programmes, and ask other grantees how they compare. If you’re an NPO or founder, consider piloting a cash-benchmarked or cash-like programme, and (if it helps) reach out for external sparring on the early design. In a world where money and attention are both scarce, starting from cash, then building up, might be the most honest way to honour the people you’re trying to serve.
Unconditional Cash Transfers: Common Questions Answered
1) Will people waste unconditional cash transfers on alcohol or “temptation goods”?
This concern comes up a lot, but it isn’t supported by the bulk of the evidence. Large reviews of unconditional cash transfers and specific trials with GiveDirectly in Kenya found little to no increase in spending on alcohol or tobacco, while spending on food, housing, assets and education rose substantially. People living in poverty know exactly how thin their margins are; when they receive a windfall, most use it to stabilise and invest, not to self-sabotage.
2) How do unconditional cash transfers affect local prices and markets?
In well-designed programmes like GiveDirectly’s, local inflation has been limited, even when transfers are relatively large. The Kenyan study that gave around $1,000 per household found that each dollar generated about 2.5 dollars in local economic activity without major price spikes. That’s because money circulates through local shops, services and labour, expanding the pie rather than just bidding up prices. Poorly designed programmes that dump goods into local markets can distort prices more than cash does.
3) Are unconditional cash transfers only suitable for the Global South?
No. While GiveDirectly began in rural East Africa, unconditional cash transfers are now being tested and used in high-income countries as well. In the US, cash trials providing $1,000 monthly to low-income individuals showed significant improvements in financial stability and health-related behaviours. J-PAL +2 J-PAL +2 New York’s public hospital system has deployed unconditional cash to patients facing pandemic-related hardship, and city-level pilots have targeted families with young children. The underlying logic (trust, flexibility, respect) is not bound to geography.
4) When are unconditional cash transfers not the right tool?
Unconditional cash transfers are powerful, but they’re not ideal for every challenge. Situations that involve strong externalities or public goods (such as vaccine campaigns, sanitation infrastructure or some environmental interventions) still require coordinated action beyond household spending. In fragile or conflict settings without functioning markets, cash might need to be combined with in-kind support. The key is to treat unconditional cash transfers as a default benchmark, then ask: “What specific problem are we solving that cash alone cannot?” If you can answer that clearly, you’re on solid ground.
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Book a Free Consultation with Romanos Boraine
Book a Free Consultation
Book a Free Consultation with Romanos Boraine
Book a Free Consultation with Romanos Boraine
Let’s talk. Book a free 20-minute discovery call with me to map out your brand, systems, or content gaps. We will identify what we can fix, fast, to help your nonprofit or startup grow smarter.
Helping nonprofits, startups, and social enterprises in South Africa grow smarter through strategic positioning, creative direction, digital systems audits, and workflow optimisation.
Explore Services
© Romanos Boraine 2025.
All Rights Reserved
Book a Free Consultation with Romanos Boraine
Let’s talk. Book a free 20-minute discovery call with me to map out your brand, systems, or content gaps. We will identify what we can fix, fast, to help your nonprofit or startup grow smarter.
Helping nonprofits, startups, and social enterprises in South Africa grow smarter through strategic positioning, creative direction, digital systems audits, and workflow optimisation.
Explore Services
© Romanos Boraine 2025.
All Rights Reserved
Book a Free Consultation with Romanos Boraine
Let’s talk. Book a free 20-minute discovery call with me to map out your brand, systems, or content gaps. We will identify what we can fix, fast, to help your nonprofit or startup grow smarter.
Helping nonprofits, startups, and social enterprises in South Africa grow smarter through strategic positioning, creative direction, digital systems audits, and workflow optimisation.
Explore Services
© Romanos Boraine 2025.
All Rights Reserved