GiveDirectly: Nonprofit Cash Transfer | Joe Huston | Talks at Google

[Music] yes so thank you guys so much for having me in general Google was super early in supporting it directly and this is our Google community broadly and in helping people out who are extremely poor by sending cash through our platform and so we've always felt you know really close to the Google community and it's nice to be able to come back and talk about what we're up to some of those sorts of debates that are happening within the development and other sectors and how cash I think is movin

g those forward as Max said I've won a few different hats that give directly when I first started to give directly I was in Kenya on the operations side sort of managing our team signing people up to receive cash I spent a sort of a year and a half or so there there about a year and a half in Uganda and just recently switched back over to the finance side in New York and what give directly does is pretty straightforward we send cash unconditionally to people living mostly in extreme poverty that

cash is a grant it's not a loan people can spend it however they want in the most typical model we will send about a thousand dollars in a couple chunks over the course of a few months and then people spend it on whatever they want in total we've raised almost a hundred and fifty million dollars to deliver as cash transfers and we've enrolled over 80 thousand households because our operations are fairly straightforward we're able to stay remarkably lean so on average about 90% of what we raise

for cash transfers gets to deliver directly to people's hands at the end of the day and then as we're sort of doing all of this work we're constantly running different types of research studies and so when we first got started in Kenya we ran a randomized control trial testing a bunch of different things about cash transfers comparing large lump sum cash transfers to recurring sort of recurring stream transfers testing whether or not mail recipients spend money differently from female recipients

as well as the effect of cash transfers on a ton of different outcome variables earnings and assets consumption but also things like stress and depression and things that since then we've done a number of different research studies we can talk about things like looking at the effects of cash transfers on macro the sort of macro aspects of the economy behavioral aspects of cash transfers whether or not sort of how cash transfers affect coffee farmers and how they invest in their farms and things

like that operationally the process looks a lot like a sort of sales and customer service operations will go door to door and collect data on the people who could potentially receive cash transfers runs sort of pretty simple logic to decide who is eligible then sort of go back and collect a little bit more data and inform them about the program will then send the money typically through mobile money and so that looks like venmo but that you're able to cash out basically anywhere around you and

we can sort of send thousands of payments with a touch on a laptop and then we have full time call centres at each of the countries where we work and so after every time we send payments we're able to call people up and confirm that they've received it ask if they have any feedback for give directly and understand if they've had any problems now that model of just sort of giving unconditional cash is very different from how we're sort of taught through aphorisms or parables about how we're suppo

sed to approach giving there's this idea that you're supposed to teach a man to fish or not give him a fish or that you should give a hand up and not a hand out and I think behind that there's this idea that giving cash can't be sustainable and there's also this idea that we should sort of distrust that people were trying to help somehow that money giving them money could be corrupting or if it's not corrupting that we just sort of can't trust from the outset that it could be spent well behind t

hat basic debate the stakes are actually remarkably high between sort of how we should approach helping people to give you a sense this is one way of sort of visualizing what's up what's up for debate the blue line is sort of global official development assistance it's one measure of the sort of total amount that governments are spending in foreign aid the sort of line that's going down over time is the cost of closing the poverty gap you can think of this as taking everyone who's below the glob

al poverty line and visualizing how much in cash it would take to get them to the poverty line now there's a lot of reasons why that's a sort of simplistic picture of what's going on but the kind of basic synthesis is that we have incredible resources available to help the people were trying to help they had to help sort of people in extreme poverty and a lot of the sort of problem of Aid and development is an allocation one that it's not so much that we need more resources but we need to better

allocate them and so this debate about how best should we help people is actually extremely important and so luckily we don't have to have this debate in this sort of arena of sort of dueling assertions it doesn't have to be this theoretical or philosophical debate about what people are really like we can test it a development that's happened over the sort of last couple of decades within development economic economics is moving a little bit away from theory towards actually putting things into

experiment experimental evaluations and so the sort of gold standard approach to this is what's called a randomized control trial it's the same way that we test medicines by randomly assigning people tied to receive or not receive a treatment and then using external evaluators to sort of test the differences in the different outcome variables between those two groups we've learned a lot of different things from that sort of about different interventions we use we've learned that we're actually

pretty bad at training people or teaching people to fish that Mike wrote this sort of effects of microfinance and things like that are actually pretty mixed we've also learned that the effects of cash are remarkably consistent that you know these sort of exact impacts can vary a lot by the structure of the cash transfers or the people who are receiving them or the context but you see a few consistent themes first people spend it pretty well you see increases in earnings and consumption decreases

in food insecurity improvements in nutrition often increases in uptake on things like health services or actual improvements in health in terms of fewer accidents or better health you see decreases in stress to give you a sense of the sort of variety of sort of responses to cash or to security one study in Malawi tested giving the families of young women small recurring - payments so just a little bit of security not a total GameChanger what they found is that those women whose families receive

d got married later pregnant later and had lower rates of HIV relative to the control group because they had a little bit more security in society on the sort of other side of the spectrum a study testing giving young young people about $400 all at once if they went back and sort of compared that group of people to a control group and found that their earnings were 40% higher that's that her basic result was mirrored and give directly studied that found that a year after people received about $1

,000 their earnings were 30% higher and their assets were 58% higher the other things you don't see are the things people are often worried about there's this sense that if you give people money they might drink it or it'll sort of be corrupting and they'll stop working but all of the evidence we have from what's been a hundred and sixty-five different studies of cash transfers which suggests that that doesn't happen the studies have found that this sort of consumption of quote temptation Goods

things like alcohol or tobacco or gambling either has stayed the same forecast recipients or has gone down and similarly the work effort how much time people are spending working has either stayed the same or gone up and be in those sort of different studies that have been done done in the developing world the other thing that's happened over the last sort of more recently over the last decade is an explosion in mobile money which has made delivering cash transfers a lot easier and so today ther

e are 93 countries with mobile money and over four hundred million current mobile money users that makes the sort of job of getting cash into people's hands pretty easy and the sort of mobile money infrastructure doesn't have to be as as robust as it is in Kenya which has the sort of best network in the world it can actually be a sort of pretty lightweight a study we did in Uganda sort of tested the limits to say how good does the payments infrastructure have to be for mobile payments to work an

d so we found just about the most remote place you could go to in Uganda a place very very sort of north in the country just on the border with South Sudan where people typically would walk something like four or five hours to get to the nearest town which was also sort of where the nearest paved road would we found that if you sort of sent mobile money to a place that actually didn't have any mobile money providers there already this market responded that the kind of network the sort of market

incentives for cashing people out worked and agents came to the village to catch people out and so the sort of technology exists to get cashed in people's hands really really cheaply as a result of those sort of two trends there's a ton of different applications where we can use cash transfers to solve or address a bunch of different types of problems and so to give you a sense these are some of the projects give directly is working on around the world and so the first one is the thing we've don

e most often it's these large one-time cash grants of about a thousand dollars and I think these are best geared if you want to give people sort of investment capital and so you see bigger increases in earnings I'd expect large increases in assets and things like that you can also use cash transfers to address humanitarian issues and so we just started a project in Uganda which has taken in a lot of different refugees from surrounding countries the typical approach to these types of crises is to

pay people who run settlement camps per head by the sort of number of people they're supporting and well that seems intuitive the incentives are all off because the incentives are to keep people alive but to not sort of support them to sort of move on with their lives and so the test we're doing in Uganda now is giving people about seven hundred and fifty dollars and letting them spend it however they want you can also use cash for things like a universal basic income and so I'm sure we'll talk

about this more in QA but the basic idea here is if you want to make sure that everybody is living up to a certain standard of living one way to kind of mechanically ensure that is to give everyone a cash transfer equal to the cost of that standard of living and so give directly just launched a study in Kenya distributing different types of cash transfers to about 16,000 people with some people receiving a universal basic income for up to 12 years on the sort of other side of the spectrum you c

an use cash transfers for things like disaster relief and so something give directly did this year is launched in Texas in Puerto Rico and hand people out debit cards for about fifteen hundred dollars that's not a life-changing amount of money in either of those places but does help sort of fill the gaps in terms of what people aren't receiving from their kind of existing support network or the existing NGOs doing disaster relief and it lets people sort of buy whatever is their top priority with

in that price range there's a big industry that exists around things like fair trade or CSR for companies to try to give back to the people that are working with and so one thing we're testing with a sort of foundation arm of a coffee company is just giving cash transfers in a coffee growing area and so we're working in eastern Uganda picked an area which is growing a lot of coffee and is given or giving people about those same $1,000 cash grants and seeing how it in general changes their lives

as well as how it changes their coffee growing practices whether they sort of start doing longer-term practices and how they approach the plants and things like that and this last thing is a project that I'm really excited about which is something we're doing with US aid in Rwanda and potentially other countries which is using cash as a literal benchmark for their existing programming and so we're running side-by-side randomized control trials in Rwanda testing for four goals that they have and

so in one case it's a nutrition program that has specific nutrition goals how we could structure a cash transfer program designed to meet those goals and basically produce a report card answering the question is the program and you're doing better than just giving the people you're trying to help the cash and letting them spend it and so that sort of provides a literal benchmark for us we'd say are we allocating money correctly and so something that's been happening in the sector as we've had th

is sort of mountain of evidence build-up and as the sort of logistics of delivering cash has become a lot easier is that the sort of rhetoric has changed dramatically it's less so that the idea of giving cash is seen as crazy or nuts or corrupting and instead you see things like this from Ban ki-moon he said that cash programming should be the preferred and default method of support a differed sort of summary of the evidence on cash called it perhaps the most thoroughly researched intervention o

ut there and so that's actually extremely exciting except that the funding hasn't changed that if you look at the sort of overall portfolio of how we're spending our money to help people it's still spent mostly not by the recipients we're trying to help and instead by policymakers and bureaucrats and donors in places like New York or DC or London and so less than 1% of US aid funding is cash based less than 2% funding at UK aid funding his cash base and the same is true in the sort of humanitari

an sectors as well and I'll pause and note that the sort of rest of the pie is not the sort of give well top charities it's not the kind of most evidence type interventions out there those were sort of remarkable inertia in the sector that we're still trying to fight and the consequence is that because we're not sort of solving the kind of allocation problem at the front end it gets solved on the back end a lot and so you see things like this from one refugee camp were 70% of Syrian refugees wer

e selling portions of food aid they were receiving to get what they actually wanted and so the sort of markets are still responding to try to correct the allocation but only further and further down the chain after that we've sort of food from other places into the country and so what can we do about it we have these sort of really effective tools we have this evidence as sort of donor is how can we approach this basic problem well part of this kind of stagnation in the sector is that it doesn't

respond how sort of like consumer goods or in general a market economy out respond and so if you look at sort of phone like a product we've had remarkable intervention innovation we've gone from this the sort of rotary dial landline phones to the iPhone X or something like that and the reason is because there are market incentives to respond to the consumer well the problem with the development sector is that the donor is the person who pays but the recipient is the person who's affected and so

you don't see the same types of incentives exist to have the same type of innovation and so you often see sort of persistence and the same types of tools that we use again and again and so somehow we have to become better donors and so these are sort of three questions you can use to to sort of force that and to force the organizations you're working with to be more and more responsive to the people you're you and they are trying to help the first one is trying to understand what the end end co

st of the intervention is how much of the year sort of donation actually ends up in value provided to the recipient the end of the road now there's lots of problems with overhead metrics and things like that and this is not that a problem with the sector is that it's heavily intermediated and so one nonprofit will take your donation and give it to another nonprofit after sort of skimming a little bit off the top they'll skim a little bit off the top for overhead and give it to another nonprofit

and even if the sort of reported overhead is very low each of those nonprofits only taking about 1% the sort of systemic overhead is extraordinarily high that if you have a chain of those nonprofits repeatedly sub granting to each other the end value that's reaching the recipient is actually very very low and that's a practice that you see again and again and again in the sector the next thing is the sort of evidence backing that has there been an external randomized control trial of the sort of

intervention that the organization is implementing how do we actually know that it works and use the same standard you would want for a medicine you would take or a product that you would serve bet your life on and lastly there's this benchmark question is the sort of funding you're providing to the organization and the program that they're implementing doing more good than the people you're actually trying to help could if you just gave them the cash now there's plenty of interventions that mi

ght meet that standard very specialized medical interventions for example or cases where there's you know a public good problem infrastructure or maybe rule of law there's a particularly good giving opportunity there but a lot of the things we're doing are trying to outspend the poor about things that they know far more about and so I think there's a lot of the sort of spending we're doing wouldn't meet this sort of basic test I think the last thing that's worth pausing on before we go to Q&A an

d dig into a bunch of other things is why is it worth giving it all and here I would say that the sort of existence of incredible opportunities to have impact I think cash is one of those but there's lots of other nonprofits that are actually doing good work provides a pretty amazing opportunity to do something great with your life that almost as a kind of side product of your day to day life by donating a certain small percent your life can be basically the same except as a side product you can

dramatically change and better lives of people who are living in extreme poverty and that's a sort of cool opportunity to with you you know you're sort of 80 years on earth and so I think despite the sort of a dark look on the sector I think there is a sort of a you know incredible opportunity out there provided by good giving opportunities that makes get giving worth doing and so with that I'll sort of turn it over to questions and looking forward to conversation I actually want to start with

just a question about your own role so this is amazing work I mean for example the Malawi thing I just learned about that yesterday about HIV so you keep learning new things about cash transfers which are amazing but I'm curious from the financial angle what kind of unique problems I imagine there some that give directly deals with that you're exposed to yeah it's it's in a lot of ways it's focusing to just be able to spend most of your time on the kind of cash pipeline and so on the finance sid

e my job is to sort of manage that entire pipeline from donor to the first bank it hits in the u.s. to the foreign exchange transaction to get to Kenyan shillings or Rwandan francs the bank it sits there and then the sort of getting to the money provider into the eventual recipient and so the problems there are to first make sure that that pipeline is as short as possible that money moves through the system incredibly quickly and so problems were sort of working on within that domain or things l

ike how do we project donations so that we can keep field operations running basically just behind them so the lag is very small second how do we sort of manage that cash prudently make sure we're getting an interest where we should and things like that and then third sort of making sure we're managing fraud different sort of on these sort of internal side with staff and things like that and externally with mobile money providers for local government and things like that and so the integrity of

the pipeline is something I spend a lot of time on as well cool any like I'm actually gonna set the dory just one moment yeah I'll go so my question is about whether an organization like yours pays a different amount than a giant multinational corporation like Google does to change currencies it seems like something that's really important to the flow of money in this organization and I I wonder if there's an opportunity for multinational corporations to help out not just by matching employees d

onations but maybe to assist with with currency exchange in in the currencies that they're already exchanging and gigantic quantities on a very frequent basis yeah it's interesting the kind of history of what we've paid has changed I think when we were sort of first getting started we were pretty naive and so we were paying about a percent sort of for a per transaction which would be extremely high for developed world currencies it's a little bit what you'd expect for the kind of developing worl

d currencies were trading in I think we've gotten better over time at competing different banks against each other and so we have a u.s. bank that quotes a rate but we also competed against our two sort of different local banks and we've added different local things so over time to impart offer competition there but also to offer kind of credit risk hedges basically while we're holding the cash there and so the total fees we're paying have dropped a ton over time and so now we're only sort of li

ke a hair above 0% or something like that that said my guess is you know the googles or something like that are probably being a step more clever and so my guess is the same opportunity still probably exists I don't know how I don't know how the tool would work this sort of like piggybacking off the transfers but I bet there is something there in terms of yeah trying to be more clever I think also as we've grown we've become a bigger player and in these markets you know it's certainly the day we

trade or something like that and so I I think that's helped in us getting better rates versus our sort of us getting first getting started thank you we can read from the first story questions so where the best reasons in your view to be skeptical about basic income projects or policies yeah I think my biggest one especially as it applies to the US or other places where it feel where basic income feels politically far is that a ubi doesn't feel like a particularly useful North Star that there's

this sort of sense of a ubi as this utopic policy and there's a because of it's sort of like elegance or simplicity there's a very good sense of what it should look like that it should be universal it should be basic which you know you could debate the exact number but it's supposed to you know sort of meet you know so basic needs and so I think almost because it has this clear template for what you should do in places where that template is politically would be politically pretty hard to implem

ent soon it doesn't tell you what the incremental policy should be to get there and so in the u.s. things that feel more tractable and maybe then more exciting or things like expand de ITC or have a child grant or something like that and I worry a little bit that the ubi and ubi pilots that including give directives that are sort of testing the utopic version or the template version aren't providing a lot of light on how to get there or on the sort of pilots that should happen in the sort of nea

rer term on policies that are sort of more likely in the u.s. I think for a lot of countries AUV I could feel closer politically India might be one example for which the sort of conversation and the pilots focusing on that template are actually pretty useful but in the u.s. I worry a lot about the distraction factor that we've like cut away the sort of wonk class who care about poverty in the US and focus them on a policy that feels far yeah and ITC is their Earned Income Tax Credit it's a very

large cash transfer u.s. also know in the comments of this question there was a lot of discussion on on inflation so there was a study that was recently pursued from the mexican cash transfer program i don't know if you want talk about that but it seemed to find that there was not inflation yeah that's or if you're familiar yeah yeah and so Mexico was one of the in that sort of chart of the different cash transfer programs they were sort of one of the leading innovators both in implanting a cash

transfer program in the developing world and in actually testing it and so the US had different types of cash support before then but they were sort of really forward-thinking as a government in working with academics to test the effects of cash transfers and so they produce some of the early results and just how cash transfers work on the sort of individual level but then also a recent analysis of those programs found that you don't see the kind of doomsday things people are worried about in t

erms of a basic income or in general expanding cash transfer programs in terms of prices just going up a ton to totally offset the value of the cash that's something that we've seen in a couple of other studies done sort of evaluating that question and give directly his first study looked at at a kind of village level and didn't see any effect on prices a thing we have in works though we don't have results out is a study specifically designed to stress test that and so we used our one-time grant

s and randomized the concentration of give directly as enrollment within a large region and so there were high concentration areas in very low concentration areas and then as we delivered what was sort of massive amounts of cash in the region researchers looked at prices in local markets as well as quantity of goods supplied local taxes and school fee payments these sorts of different kind of macro or community level effects and so those are results I think will have out early next year or so th

at I hope can sort of contribute to that debate as well I think on the theory of it a lot of the ways people talk about inflation the sort of econ model is too simple that they're sort of holding constant how much can be supplied that a lot of times either big companies can sort of respond to increases in demand by supplying more of the good or oftentimes in the developing world something you see is the cash supplied increases the the cash given increases the supply and so an example could be yo

u would be worried that you gave cash to an area and the area in general likes consuming fish and so the price of fish will go up but the piece that you're missing is that often when people receive the cash they buy boats or fishing nets or cooler is to sort of be middlemen between fishermen and markets and so actually the sort of quantity of supply of fish goes up as much or more and so I think the sort of model people use to answer and think about the inflation question has to sort of not keep

supply fixed when when debating that part yes okay sorry I would like to learn them a little bit more about your ubi pilot in Kenya you said and I know we have already talked about you bear a little bit but I guess there's a reason behind give directly jumping into basic income and you're providing the service to 12,000 people I think and I always wondering like how can you get from those results you're getting from the ubi which is only paid to a fraction of people in the country then to a mor

e universal aspect where all people would receive it and what are you hoping to learn and do you have any results as a far yeah and so when compactly was sort of seeing the debate on ubi spiked up again over the last couple of years the thing we saw it what it was was a debate about how a particular type of cash transfer works there is these questions on the sort of pro side that it would enable different types of risk-taking or entrepreneurship help people sort of live their lives better and th

e con side people were worried that people would stop working or spend it badly or things like that and that those questions are testable and so like other people sort of launching pilots we saw this was very much within our sweet spot to implement a cash transfer program and then work with researchers to sort of test the results the basic structure we used was kind of to design to test what's unique about a ubi versus other cash transfer programs and so in part together you're sort of a big pie

ce of a ubi is that it's universal and so we randomized at the village level with whole villages randomly assigned to receive cash or not and then we also randomly assigned some villages to receive cash for 12 years in some villages to receive cash for two because a scaled up version of ubi would be for your whole life but a lot of this sort of pilots that have have been done and that are sort of coming online or shorter-term and so a potential research question you might have is can you extrapo

late to how it would the sort of incentives would actually be for people if they had that sort of longer-term security again on the sort of pro side and the con side and so that sort of full study just kicked off a couple of weeks ago and so it'll be a little bit of a ways before we have results those sort of first end lines and things like that will be within the next year or so so it won't be 12 years but it will be a little bit of time that said about a year ago we started providing payments

in one kind of pilot village and so got to sort of ask people what it's like to receive a basic income and obviously that's totally anecdotal it shouldn't be confused with the RCT evidence but even that was pretty interesting I think if you sort of ask people what it's like you see the things that are kind of consistent with the broader evidence people spend it in a ton of different ways because they have different priorities you saw a lot of spending on food if people especially sort of elderly

people who couldn't work different types of investments in people's job or businesses whether that's buying sort of small amounts of capital to for a shoe business I saw people actually buying fishing nets it's an area right on the sort of edge of Lake Victoria people investing in school fees secondary school isn't free in Kenya health and things like that some of the unique things were we were worried on the kind of operational perspective how people would perceive a ubi sort of a few differen

t aspects of that one of them is universality even though the sort of village we're working in and the groups of villages we're working in are in absolute terms all very very poor there's still a different decent amount of income variation within those villages and so in this particular one the poorest people had walls you could essentially see through and the sort of whole house was made from organic materials mud and thatch and things like that and the sort of richest couple had a tractor and

so that's a sort of remarkable distance in wealth and ink and things like that and so one thing we asked people was just how do you feel that everyone's getting the same amount of cash support does it seem fair should give directly as we often do try tried to have picked the poorest people in this village and people responded pretty uniformly that they were like we were glad you didn't try to meddle that you just sort of didn't try to pick who should receive and so that was pretty interesting fr

om a sort of perceived fairness perspective about a ubi and connects the some of the debate people have about the stigmatization of receiving benefits or things like that another again qualitative thing we asked people about was whether individually targeted payments were okay a kind of potential benefit of a ubi is that it frees people in relationships because each person has their own individual security and so if a relationship is abusive or there's a bad power dynamic somebody could leave or

at least be in a more level playing field the flipside if you're a foreign organization is that it could look like you're trying to break up families by insisting that each person has their own cell phone in their own stream of payments and so we are worried that that would be perceived badly again the surprise is that basically everyone said just the opposite that individually targeted payments let people prioritize whatever was their top priority and sort of made debates easier there is a sen

se of he has his money and I have my money and we get to spend it on what we want and so there's not as much of a for the ubi payments a shared pool it has to be fought over and that was pretty interesting as well thank you and yeah the some of the negative income tax experiments in the 70s seemed at first to suggest that divorce rates went up but subsequent analysis found that didn't yeah it's interesting how this individual individual Holly versus family orientation yes and everything um I wan

ted to learn a little bit more about the evaluation of the cash transfer program so firstly I wanted to know how long you track people for after they've received the cash payment and then in terms of logistics and scaling up do you think that the evaluation model you have right now could be then used by say a USAID or one of the other big donors for evaluating yeah and so it varies a lot by study and so different studies are targeted towards different questions which require a different time hor

izon the kind of basic template structure is first external researchers and so academics at places like MIT or Harvard who are sort of helping design the study with us an external research surveying organization and so it's not give directly staff asking people about their consumption patterns it's sort of different people from a different organization who don't have a relationship with us it's important to pre-register the study basically sort of say we're going to do this study provide a pre a

nalysis plan which says we're going to answer these questions that help sort of solve for cherry picking on the studies as in not holding back studies that have bad results or no results as well as cherry picking on the analysis not sort of redoing the analysis again and again until you get the sort of results you want after that in terms of the horizon again that's varied a lot for us we have one study that is going to have it's something like 18-month results out some early next year but it's

sort of queued up to attack people for a decade or so in terms of the sample size and things like that because give directly as younger our ability to have a super long horizon already done is harder in the sort of existing literature the longest follow-up is a paper in Uganda that that was that sort of four hundred dollar cash grant I mentioned to youth and that's gone out to I think the eight year mark and sort of found persistent results and there's been a study in Sri Lanka that went out to

five years and found it was cash transfers to small business people and found at the five-year mark markedly different earnings sort of even persisting to that level in terms of scale in part you know the the program we were doing with US aid is a good example of large funders are still able to run those types of randomized control trials in many ways the big con about RCTs is that they're expensive you have to have giant samples you have to be able to fund things like research costs and things

like that and so in many ways large funders best equipped to help implement them a quick follow-up on that so seems like there have been some long-term evaluations have there been long-term treatments in the same way that I mean certainly not the cash transfer spaces my understanding but are you aware of others right that 12 years is pretty remarkable yeah and so I think the examples what I haven't seen as much of as long term evaluation paired with long term treatment the long term treatments I

've seen are in places like Brazil and Mexico that have followed been targeted towards families with young children and provided conditional cash transfers to send their children to school and followed families for a long period as a result and so getting into that is for decade long type time period and so I think we have seen examples of that I haven't seen the personally the evaluation paired just sort of check what is it like to receive cash for 12 years but I do think we have seen sort of e

xamples of that long-term treatment yep I think we have a question on the VC real quick are you still there yeah I'm still here the only other things that I found having extraordinary impact is basic education of course this is give directly versus a basic education it's all right yeah yeah and so I think the case for a basic education in a country or something like that is is very good and I think it's a good example of the type of public good or public infrastructure that is hard for cash to j

ust sort of replace and so in many ways I think they're not competitive and in fact are often complementary that a big thing we see people consume when we give people cash are school fees to be able to go to school or school uniforms or school supplies or solar lights to I home to do homework and things like that and so I think there's a lot of compliments on in this sort of ecosystem that's that is a kind of giving opportunity I think especially for nonprofits it's hard to be helpful providing

a basic education and so I think it's a hard thing to do and so I don't know of a lot of really good giving opportunities to directly support basic education even though I think it's a useful thing for a country to provide and it's an important thing for a country to have it's similar to I think it's hard for nonprofits to build bridges or to build hospitals that I think that those sorts of big lasting institutions you want to exist in societies are hard to provide through sort of donated dollar

s and so as concepts I think they're complementary and both important and I think as giving opportunities the case for cash is a little bit better thank you hi so I'm curious how you guys think about balancing your portfolio so both like geographically how do you choose the locations you're gonna do you're going to kind of deploy the programs to and then how do you kind of split between research programs and just funding the programs you already know work pretty well I guess I'm also especially

interested in the decision to start the program in Houston which seems like an outlier in terms of like how much money you gave per person and also like how much that money can buy so yeah just how do you kind of think about balancing your overall portfolio yeah and so in general our mission is not to sort of we don't have like an expand mission we don't have the goal of like be in every country on earth or sort of provide every structure of cash transfer we're pretty focused well I'll talk abou

t the sort of Houston and Puerto Rica thing but in general pretty focus within East Africa and sort of each edition of a country is that are targeted towards a particular goal a research program that we think is especially valuable or sort of important for policy impact against that kind of baseline the way we sort of evaluate new projects is I think a big potential value of cash transfers is the indirect effects on the sector and there's a few different sectors whether it's providing research t

hat's especially useful for developing world governments in designing their own cash transfer programs providing cash transfer structures that provide benchmarks for aid programs that exist around the world or in general sort of pushing on the debate about how we should help people the sort of Houston in Puerto Rico examples we debated a lot internally what we saw was basically an opportunity to connect different conversations a kind of weird thing that happens in conversations about giving and

especially about cash is they can stay pretty disjointed and so the basic income conversation can happen without referencing any of the papers within the developing world about a lot of what we already know about how cash transfers work and so there can be sort of remarkable ignorant about all of the things that have already been studied we can sort of throw up our hands in Texas about how do we help people without any of the sort of sense about how helpful cash transfers can be in that type of

situation and so we sort of saw it as an opportunity to one in part provide a a set of pipes to deliver cash for donors who probably weren't going to give to East Africa otherwise there were people who specifically wanted to give to Texas or to Puerto Rico and so we sort of could provide that utility to enable that and then to sort of provide the kind of cash alternative in a new conversation that we hope will sort of carry over into the broader conversation in aid and in basic income or somethi

ng like that and so the bet here I think is that we can sort of connect conversations that are staying disparate and that the there isn't just sort of otherwise an allocation from East Africa to Texas that there's sort of different giving pools and if that's the case then it's absolutely the case there should be some type of utility for people to give to Texas and to help those people better than the sort of existing opportunities that move to the back - dorri this is a question I had actually w

hich was about the savings compacts that were reported in this Fox article and the income experiment where people sort of pool up their payments and give it to a single person so that they can engage in more capital-intensive investments or things like that it seems like that presents an opportunity for financial institutions or other changes so curious your thoughts on that yeah and so the quick slightly longer explanation of what this is is in this ubi pilot village where people were receiving

basic income payments a thing people wanted to do is purchase big things bigger than what their monthly check was and so they form different types of groups within the village and basically made a ledger of each person every month contributes some portion of their basic income payment and one person every month receives all of those payments and so it's a way to convert those stream payments into sort of semi recurring lump sum ones instead in terms of financial institutions I think people do h

ave access and so I think maybe the opportunity is like a sales one and so impasse is the mobile money provider in Kenya and it has a ton of different savings and loan products built in you can have basically a savings account on these feature phones the same ones that have a snake and things like that you can have a savings account you can draw a loan through your impasse account recently they added the ability to buy government bonds again through these these sort of mobile money accounts whic

h is pretty neat and so one thing I have a question I have is whether or not you'll start to see a take-up of that as people you know as the sort of need and demand for these types of services persists and maybe he'll build comfort and then the other side potential there's a sort of potential for better outreach and things like that from financial institutions there are also kind of small banks and microfinance companies in Kenya that I could see potentially moving in I haven't seen that happen

much yet but I could totally buy that it could yep what do you guys be willing to I mean you're sort of underwriting these things at that point is there like a written guarantee of the stream right it's it yeah it's interesting I don't know how to turn that give directly promise into like a something you could lend off of or something like that it's a verbal Garon but yep maybe the sort of track record by year three or something like that enables that I don't know so I think we're just about tim

e but one last question on the efficiency of the transfer efficiency of the basic income experiment relative to cash transfers yeah maybe long-run expectations there yeah and so the the kind of different trade-offs for the basic income experiment are there are more payments and mobile money providers have a per payment fee and so there's more payments per value distributed and so mobile money fees are a little bit higher we have to have our call center running longer per recipient because people

are getting paid for two years and so there's higher follow-up costs that said the total value distributed is higher per recipient the nurse or typical one thousand dollar payments and the way that all Nets is that the two-year arm is much less efficient it's something like 75 or 80 percent the 12-year arm is much more efficient and the sort of combination of those two that sort of weighted average across those different arms is about in that sort of 88 90 percent range the next question on eff

iciency was actually Harvard Harvey which is pretty interesting and so we found the kind of balance of costs are very different labor is a lot more expensive to sign people out for cash here than in East Africa but there's absolutely there's zero FX for us and payments are cheaper we're the sort of debit cards or basically zero fees for us and for the recipients and so efficiencies at the scale right will be able to operate at it's a little bit higher than our typical program interesting great w

ell thank you so much for coming to Google yeah thank you so much for having me you you