Last summer, on a trip to Kenya and Tanzania that literally peaked at the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, I was blown away by an experience that took me into the depths of extreme poverty in and around Nairobi. Before arriving in East Africa, I had coordinated with members of the gracious team at GiveDirectly to learn more about their operations on the ground in Kenya for a day, and although I was aware of their work as a leading NGO that specializes in direct digital cash transfers to people living below the poverty line, I truly had no idea what to expect.
A bit more on my relationship to GiveDirectly before detailing the day they put together for me—and I swear this isn’t meant to be a free ad. I first discovered the org in 2017 while reading Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists. In addition to laying the case for a 15-hour work week and other seemingly impossible progressive ideas, he expands on the notion of guaranteed universal basic income that was the subject of his 2014 TED talk. I’d never really come across UBI before, but the way he argues for it—asserting that unconditionally giving money to people in poverty grants them the dignity to rise out of it—struck me as so simple and so obviously true. Why would we assume to know what someone in need really needs? If we want to help, why wouldn’t we give them the means to address those very personal needs on their own terms? What other thing can do that in this world better than money?
Detractors of UBI argue that free cash removes the incentive to work and funds alcohol/drug use, among other downsides. There’s plenty of research that suggests these claims aren’t true (examples here and here), but despite all the evidence in the world, it seems like a lot of the anti-cash transfer camp just believes that poor people are fundamentally lazy. That a lack of money is a symptom of poverty rather than a cause of it. When I came across the idea of direct cash transfers in 2017 thanks to Bregman, who mentions GiveDirectly in Utopia for Realists, I fell squarely in the opposite camp. The camp that believes the vast majority of people in poverty simply want to invest in themselves and their families, and when given the opportunity through cash transfers, they do exactly that—through savings, livestock, education, and so on.
I’ve never known how much to give to charity, and there are different schools of thought on that topic, but 2017 was also the year that I started a job in tech that allowed me to start giving what felt like a meaningful sum. Now, I’m not at the 10-percent-of-my-lifetime-income level that the most popular Giving What We Can Pledge asks—the one effective altruists like my guy Sam Harris and definitely not my guy Sam Bankman-Fried have committed to. I will say though, that once I came across a cause and a charity that really clicked for me, I was eager to start giving to it on a regular basis. Does some of that behavior have to do with feeling good about myself? Probably, and I don’t think writing about my charitable acts here is getting me any closer to giving from a place of pure altruism. But it’s also true that I like knowing exactly where the money I give is going—into the hands of people who need it, no strings attached. Not into an ether disguised as something like the Red Cross.
Anyway. Back to Kenya. If I was pretty bought into the spirit of direct cash transfers from the somewhat theoretical confines of my own research and testimonies on GiveDirectly’s site, talking face-to-face with recipients in the actual context of extreme poverty brought me to a new level. When I arrived at the org’s Nairobi office one morning in July 2022, the local team walked me through a presentation on their high level operations, showed me their call center workflow, and explained the challenges of delivering cash transfers at scale (identifying recipients, getting access to communities where they live, protecting them from harm, and much more). Then after a bit of prep, we hopped into a van and drove to Mathare, the second-largest slum in Nairobi, home to 500,000 people on roughly half a square mile of land.
A couple of men who grew up in Mathare met us on the edge of the slum to guide us into it—I learned that they were affiliated with community organizations that help connect youth in the area to opportunities and stay out of trouble, and without them access to people who might benefit most from cash transfers would be significantly harder. After following them through narrow, muddy alleys for a while, we met with the first of three recipients I’d talk to that day. He couldn’t have been older than 25, he had two kids, and—in Swahili translated by my GD friends—he told me he’d used the cash to buy a motorcycle so that he and his cousin could become drivers. The two of them are part of a group that all receives direct transfers, and he said that they all save together and occasionally collaborate on what to put the money towards, but that ultimately it’s an individual choice as to how it’s spent.
The second recipient we talked to while she sat behind the counter of her shop, where she sold the only refrigerated drinks in the area and facilitated M-PESA transfers for locals. She explained that she had an ambition to rebuild the structure we were standing in—small and made of tin sheets and wood—and add a second floor that would contain a cyber cafe, also the only of its kind in the area. Then we made our way out of the slum as one of the community organizers told me about the way efforts to show possibility to the youth of Mathare opens up their sense of dignity and turns them away from a possible life of crime and drug/alcohol abuse. He also expressed a distrust of high-profile politicians, saying that many who live in slums feel that candidates for office just come there for empty talk and a photo op. They rarely bring real solutions to the extreme poverty faced by so many Kenyans.
Our last conversation with a recipient—ironically after a brief stop to a Deputy County Commissioner’s office to hear from the local government, which to be fair also runs its own cash transfer program—took place at a hotel outside of the slum. I learned that refugees are especially vulnerable to abuse from others in the community if they’re receiving cash transfers, so they always have to be met away from their home or place of work. In this case we talked to a 22-year-old woman from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who survived violent conflicts in the country, separation from her entire family, 2 months of walking to the Uganda border, and sexual assault before arriving in Kenya with nothing and no one but a baby boy. After a little help from a woman already overstretched by responsibilities to her own large family, she found a way to start a business in the slum by deep frying and selling unwanted chicken parts. GD transfers helped her buy more supplies and better quality products to strengthen the business, and she saved 500 Kenyan shillings (~$4.25 at the time) per month for her son’s education. I wrote the following in my journal that night about our exchange:
“Incredibly she didn’t break down at all when recounting the terrible things she had to go through to get to Nairobi, but she did when talking about the GD $. Despite having some challenges not being able to get a health permit for her business, she has ambition to do more & expand. She spoke for a long time and is clearly sharp/driven. Really something to witness.”
It’s difficult to avoid even inadvertently positioning myself as a white savior—or a mzungu (slang for white person in East Africa) savior—here. The fact of the matter is that I went to a predominantly Black area of the world, witnessed an extreme poverty that is the daily reality for recipients of a charity I donate to, then came back home to continue living life as a privileged white person in the world’s richest country. But I guess that possibility, that probability, is worth it so as not to keep to myself the blunt reality of what good a little cash can do for those in need. Or to go a level deeper, to explore what it really means to help someone seize their own dignity. Maybe direct cash transfers and the idea of UBI aren’t for you, but I’d be willing to bet that knowing exactly where your charitable donations go is.
So next time you decide to give, whether it’s on Giving Tuesday, in response to an immediate crisis, or just because you feel like it, do some research! Connect with where the money goes! Maybe if we all do that, we’ll actually learn how to be real altruists. Even as westerners. Imagine that.