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