Young people and whole villages can use it to bootstrap: things like proper cell service, internet, and healthy food become affordable where before they were not.
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GiveDirectly is my charity of choice right now. I have a $1000 monthly recurring with them.
The difference in cost of living between San Francisco and rural Kenya is vast. The upshot is that an amount that many of us here on HN can handle is life changing for a lot of people on the other end.
I live in a co-op, so I save more than that every month compared to many of my friends in rent alone, and still we all have ridiculously comfortable lives.
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Poverty exists here too, but a lot of it's entrenched and intractable. It has complex causes like bad urban design, bad schools, and political gridlock. It's hard to create improvement with a donation. It requires creative activism.
Rural Kenya and Uganda, on the other hand, have lots of communities full of bright young people where the main thing holding them back really is just an abject lack of resources.
That means there's an opportunity, and I think GiveDirectly is the best organization right now to take it.
- They are effective. They don't do virtue signaling. They don't helicopter in, build a cinderblock schoolhouse, and then pose for photos with smiling kids. They measure outcomes.
- They are efficient. They stick to cash transfers, the most direct way of giving. They track and advertise the fraction of their income that they lose to corruption and overhead. Most charities are worse on those metrics and don't talk about them.
- They are rational. They don't do sob stories. They don't spam. They are run like a startup, by economists.
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Be an activist locally. Be a donor globally. Many of us are extremely lucky and, by global standards, powerful. Wield it well :)
[0] http://www.nation.co.ke/newsplex/counties-purchasing-power/2...
I didn't see the specific region named in the NYT article.
2280 shillings is about 28-38% of the amount needed to get above the (absolute) poverty line, with the true number likely being closer to the middle or lower end of that range. It likely brings the people whom they chose out of poverty and around on-par with their just-above-poverty neighbours but not much more. I'm inclined to believe that they chose a region of Kenya where there was a good mix of people living just below the poverty line and people living just above the poverty line for exactly this reason.
I'm not sure about the distinction between extreme poverty, regular poverty and a national standard poverty line (in Kenya). When so much of your population is in absolute poverty, I don't think that a national standard line makes much sense. It does, of course, make more sense in the developed world where shelter alone will cost more money than the median Kenyan spends in a year; the median Kenyan is not below the global poverty line.
From the NYT article:
Kogelo, where Obama’s father was born, is just 20 miles from the village, which lies close to the banks of Lake Victoria. (This is the first village mentioned)
We took off at dawn from Kisumu, a bustling industrial city on the banks of Lake Victoria, and followed a two-lane highway to Bondo, a small trading city filled with cattle, bicycles and roadside food stands. From there, we turned inland from the lake and drove into a lush agricultural region. (This is the second village mentioned)
All across the villages of western Kenya, it was clear to me just how much aid money was wasted on unnecessary stuff.
> The nonprofit is in the process of registering roughly 40 more villages with a total of 6,000 adult residents, giving those people a guaranteed, 12-year-long, poverty-ending income. An additional 80 villages, with 11,500 residents all together, will receive a two-year basic income. With this initiative, GiveDirectly — with an office in New York and funded in no small part by Silicon Valley — is starting the world’s first true test of a universal basic income.