WEBVTT

00:00:00.914 --> 00:00:02.323
I suspect that

00:00:02.323 --> 00:00:04.080
every aid worker in Africa

00:00:04.080 --> 00:00:05.673
comes to a time in her career

00:00:05.673 --> 00:00:08.989
when she wants to take all 
the money for her project —

00:00:08.989 --> 00:00:12.091
maybe it's a school or a training program —

00:00:12.091 --> 00:00:13.980
pack it in a suitcase,

00:00:13.980 --> 00:00:17.964
get on a plane flying over the
poorest villages in the country,

00:00:17.964 --> 00:00:21.148
and start throwing that money out the window.

00:00:21.148 --> 00:00:23.464
Because to a veteran aid worker,

00:00:23.464 --> 00:00:26.171
the idea of putting cold, hard cash

00:00:26.171 --> 00:00:29.210
into the hands of the poorest people on Earth

00:00:29.210 --> 00:00:30.865
doesn't sound crazy,

00:00:30.865 --> 00:00:34.941
it sounds really satisfying.

NOTE Paragraph

00:00:34.941 --> 00:00:37.843
I had that moment right about the 10-year mark,

00:00:37.843 --> 00:00:40.310
and luckily, that's also when I learned

00:00:40.310 --> 00:00:43.974
that this idea actually exists,

00:00:43.974 --> 00:00:47.817
and it might be just what the aid system needs.

00:00:47.817 --> 00:00:50.520
Economists call it an unconditional cash transfer,

00:00:50.520 --> 00:00:52.680
and it's exactly that: It's cash given

00:00:52.680 --> 00:00:54.952
with no strings attached.

00:00:54.952 --> 00:00:56.516
Governments in developing countries

00:00:56.516 --> 00:00:58.192
have been doing this for decades,

00:00:58.192 --> 00:01:00.724
and it's only now, with more evidence

00:01:00.724 --> 00:01:03.915
and new technology that it's possible

00:01:03.915 --> 00:01:08.234
to make this a model for delivering aid.

00:01:08.234 --> 00:01:11.148
It's a pretty simple idea, right?

NOTE Paragraph

00:01:11.148 --> 00:01:15.254
Well, why did I spend a decade doing other stuff

00:01:15.254 --> 00:01:17.392
for the poor?

00:01:17.392 --> 00:01:20.935
Honestly, I believed that I could do more good

00:01:20.935 --> 00:01:22.881
with money for the poor

00:01:22.881 --> 00:01:25.491
than the poor could do for themselves.

00:01:25.491 --> 00:01:26.524
I held two assumptions:

00:01:26.524 --> 00:01:29.113
One, that poor people are poor in part

00:01:29.113 --> 00:01:31.115
because they're uneducated and

00:01:31.115 --> 00:01:33.275
don't make good choices;

00:01:33.275 --> 00:01:35.986
two is that we then need people like me

00:01:35.986 --> 00:01:39.724
to figure out what they need and get it to them.

00:01:39.724 --> 00:01:43.946
It turns out, the evidence says otherwise.

00:01:43.946 --> 00:01:46.795
In recent years, researchers have been studying

00:01:46.795 --> 00:01:50.200
what happens when we give poor people cash.

00:01:50.200 --> 00:01:52.871
Dozens of studies show across the board

00:01:52.871 --> 00:01:55.627
that people use cash transfers

00:01:55.627 --> 00:01:57.795
to improve their own lives.

00:01:57.795 --> 00:02:00.643
Pregnant women in Uruguay buy better food

00:02:00.643 --> 00:02:02.877
and give birth to healthier babies.

00:02:02.877 --> 00:02:05.971
Sri Lankan men invest in their businesses.

00:02:05.971 --> 00:02:08.669
Researchers who studied our work in Kenya

00:02:08.669 --> 00:02:11.586
found that people invested in a range of assets,

00:02:11.586 --> 00:02:15.936
from livestock to equipment 
to home improvements,

00:02:15.936 --> 00:02:18.058
and they saw increases in income

00:02:18.058 --> 00:02:20.441
from business and farming

00:02:20.441 --> 00:02:24.131
one year after the cash was sent.

00:02:24.131 --> 00:02:26.695
None of these studies found that people

00:02:26.695 --> 00:02:29.104
spend more on drinking or smoking

00:02:29.104 --> 00:02:31.609
or that people work less.

00:02:31.609 --> 00:02:35.717
In fact, they work more.

NOTE Paragraph

00:02:35.717 --> 00:02:38.980
Now, these are all material needs.

00:02:38.980 --> 00:02:42.151
In Vietnam, elderly recipients used

00:02:42.151 --> 00:02:46.662
their cash transfers to pay for coffins.

00:02:46.662 --> 00:02:50.673
As someone who wonders if Maslow got it wrong,

00:02:50.673 --> 00:02:55.400
I find this choice to prioritize spiritual needs

00:02:55.400 --> 00:02:57.667
deeply humbling.

00:02:57.667 --> 00:02:59.880
I don't know if I would have chosen to give food

00:02:59.880 --> 00:03:03.491
or equipment or coffins,

00:03:03.491 --> 00:03:05.781
which begs the question:

00:03:05.781 --> 00:03:08.777
How good are we at allocating resources

00:03:08.777 --> 00:03:10.622
on behalf of the poor?

00:03:10.622 --> 00:03:13.517
Are we worth the cost?

00:03:13.517 --> 00:03:15.460
Again, we can look at empirical evidence

00:03:15.460 --> 00:03:18.250
on what happens when we give people stuff

00:03:18.250 --> 00:03:20.926
of our choosing.

00:03:20.926 --> 00:03:23.795
One very telling study looked at a program in India

00:03:23.795 --> 00:03:27.102
that gives livestock to the so-called ultra-poor,

00:03:27.102 --> 00:03:31.023
and they found that 30 percent of recipients

00:03:31.023 --> 00:03:35.176
had turned around and sold the
livestock they had been given

00:03:35.176 --> 00:03:38.529
for cash.

00:03:38.529 --> 00:03:40.087
The real irony is,

00:03:40.087 --> 00:03:42.668
for every 100 dollars worth of assets

00:03:42.668 --> 00:03:44.820
this program gave someone,

00:03:44.820 --> 00:03:49.506
they spent another 99 dollars to do it.

00:03:49.506 --> 00:03:53.152
What if, instead, we use technology to put cash,

00:03:53.152 --> 00:03:57.739
whether from aid agencies or from any one of us

00:03:57.739 --> 00:04:01.509
directly into a poor person's hands.

00:04:01.509 --> 00:04:04.379
Today, three in four Kenyans use mobile money,

00:04:04.379 --> 00:04:07.202
which is basically a bank account that can run

00:04:07.202 --> 00:04:08.700
on any cell phone.

00:04:08.700 --> 00:04:12.166
A sender can pay a 1.6 percent fee

00:04:12.166 --> 00:04:14.204
and with the click of a button

00:04:14.204 --> 00:04:17.155
send money directly to a recipient's account

00:04:17.155 --> 00:04:19.885
with no intermediaries.

00:04:19.885 --> 00:04:22.748
Like the technologies that are disrupting industries

00:04:22.748 --> 00:04:24.547
in our own lives,

00:04:24.547 --> 00:04:27.110
payments technology in poor countries

00:04:27.110 --> 00:04:30.217
could disrupt aid.

00:04:30.217 --> 00:04:32.529
It's spreading so quickly that it's possible

00:04:32.529 --> 00:04:35.061
to imagine reaching billions

00:04:35.061 --> 00:04:37.860
of the world's poor this way.

NOTE Paragraph

00:04:37.860 --> 00:04:40.481
That's what we've started to do at GiveDirectly.

00:04:40.481 --> 00:04:42.146
We're the first organization

00:04:42.146 --> 00:04:45.319
dedicated to providing cash transfers to the poor.

00:04:45.319 --> 00:04:49.987
We've sent cash to 35,000 
people across rural Kenya

00:04:49.987 --> 00:04:51.154
and Uganda

00:04:51.154 --> 00:04:54.332
in one-time payments of 1,000 dollars

00:04:54.332 --> 00:04:56.917
per family.

00:04:56.917 --> 00:04:59.177
So far, we've looked for the poorest people

00:04:59.177 --> 00:05:02.480
in the poorest villages, and in this part of the world,

00:05:02.480 --> 00:05:03.924
they're the ones living in homes

00:05:03.924 --> 00:05:05.102
made of mud and thatch,

00:05:05.102 --> 00:05:07.562
not cement and iron.

00:05:07.562 --> 00:05:09.784
So let's say that's your family.

00:05:09.784 --> 00:05:12.236
We show up at your door with an Android phone.

00:05:12.236 --> 00:05:14.563
We'll get your name, take your photo

00:05:14.563 --> 00:05:15.979
and a photo of your hut

00:05:15.979 --> 00:05:18.454
and grab the GPS coordinates.

00:05:18.454 --> 00:05:20.554
That night, we send all the data to the cloud,

00:05:20.554 --> 00:05:22.834
and each piece gets checked

00:05:22.834 --> 00:05:24.712
by an independent team

00:05:24.712 --> 00:05:28.103
using, for one example, satellite images.

00:05:28.103 --> 00:05:30.099
Then, we'll come back,

00:05:30.099 --> 00:05:32.490
we'll sell you a basic cell phone

00:05:32.490 --> 00:05:34.757
if you don't have one already,

00:05:34.757 --> 00:05:37.078
and a few weeks later,

00:05:37.078 --> 00:05:39.369
we send money to it.

00:05:39.369 --> 00:05:40.930
Something that five years ago

00:05:40.930 --> 00:05:42.458
would have seemed impossible

00:05:42.458 --> 00:05:45.343
we can now do efficiently

00:05:45.343 --> 00:05:47.481
and free of corruption.

NOTE Paragraph

00:05:47.481 --> 00:05:49.797
The more cash we give to the poor,

00:05:49.797 --> 00:05:53.453
and the more evidence we have that it works,

00:05:53.453 --> 00:05:55.861
the more we have to reconsider

00:05:55.861 --> 00:05:58.350
everything else we give.

00:05:58.350 --> 00:06:01.938
Today, the logic behind aid is too often,

00:06:01.938 --> 00:06:05.050
well, we do at least some good.

00:06:05.050 --> 00:06:06.466
When we're complacent

00:06:06.466 --> 00:06:08.836
with that as our bar,

00:06:08.836 --> 00:06:11.428
when we tell ourselves that giving aid

00:06:11.428 --> 00:06:14.342
is better than no aid at all,

00:06:14.342 --> 00:06:16.614
we tend to invest inefficiently,

00:06:16.614 --> 00:06:20.596
in our own ideas that strike us as innovative,

00:06:20.596 --> 00:06:22.750
on writing reports,

00:06:22.750 --> 00:06:26.596
on plane tickets and SUVs.

00:06:26.596 --> 00:06:28.920
What if the logic was,

00:06:28.920 --> 00:06:34.191
will we do better than cash given directly?

00:06:34.191 --> 00:06:35.701
Organizations would have to prove

00:06:35.701 --> 00:06:37.930
that they're doing more good for the poor

00:06:37.930 --> 00:06:40.686
than the poor can do for themselves.

00:06:40.686 --> 00:06:43.634
Of course, giving cash won't create public goods

00:06:43.634 --> 00:06:48.952
like eradicating disease or 
building strong institutions,

00:06:48.952 --> 00:06:51.178
but it could set a higher bar

00:06:51.178 --> 00:06:54.140
for how we help individual families

00:06:54.140 --> 00:06:57.166
improve their lives.

NOTE Paragraph

00:06:57.166 --> 00:06:58.729
I believe in aid.

00:06:58.729 --> 00:07:01.828
I believe most aid is better than just

00:07:01.828 --> 00:07:03.740
throwing money out of a plane.

00:07:03.740 --> 00:07:06.288
I am also absolutely certain

00:07:06.288 --> 00:07:08.521
that a lot of aid today

00:07:08.521 --> 00:07:12.046
isn't better than giving directly to the poor.

00:07:12.046 --> 00:07:15.922
I hope that one day, it will be.

NOTE Paragraph

00:07:15.922 --> 00:07:17.978
Thank you.

NOTE Paragraph

00:07:17.978 --> 00:07:21.945
(Applause)