20-05-2025
Nick Allardice
Credit - Courtesy Allardice
GiveDirectly was already one of the world's largest providers of unconditional cash transfers to people living in extreme poverty when Nick Allardice, former head of the grassroots organizing platform came on as president and CEO last year. Now, under Allardice's leadership, the nonprofit is undertaking its most ambitious projects yet—despite a $20 million hit to funding because of USAID cuts.
'We're leaning more into humanitarian work now because cash can be uniquely powerful when all the other supply chains are super disrupted,' Allardice says.
In the U.S., GiveDirectly's Rx Kids initiative is expanding to more than a dozen communities, after an initial program in Flint, Mich. showed promising improvements to participants' health and financial security. The program provides poor expectant mothers with $1,500 during pregnancy and $500 a month for up to a year after the child's birth. Other new initiatives include a pilot program in Nigeria testing anticipatory aid, sending money to people before a flood hits; another uses phone location data in the Democratic Republic of Congo to spot and send cash payments to people fleeing violence—cutting a typical 130-day wait for relief to five days.
Allardice's biggest bet: a program in Malawi, one of the world's poorest countries, to test 'whether it's possible to catalyze an entire country out of poverty simultaneously.' To find out, GiveDirectly will send 200,000 adults in one region $550 each over the next 18 months in its largest-ever cash program. 'The world needs more moonshots,' Allardice says.
Write to Kerri Anne Renzulli at
