GiveDirectly is a charity that we’ve written about a lot here at Future Perfect. Their project is, on the surface, incredibly simple: send cash straight to the poorest people in the world, so they can spend it on whatever they need. The big idea is that cash has far less overhead than other forms of philanthropy, can be used for almost anything, and respects the recipients, who know better than anyone else what they need.

GiveDirectly started only a decade ago, but it’s grown into a major force in international aid. Not only has it moved hundreds of millions of dollars in cash transfers to the global poor every year, but it has also funded large-scale randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of cash transfers, growing the evidence about where they help and how they can (and can’t) change people’s lives.

This week, GiveDirectly is coming forward about another, less-discussed piece of the global aid picture: fraud and theft. In a detailed report released earlier this week, they explain how nearly a million dollars was stolen in 2022 from GiveDirectly aid recipients in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

That’s less than 1 percent of the money GiveDirectly moved last year, but it has had an enormous impact on the intended recipients in the DRC, where more than half the population lives on less than $2.15 a day, and has prompted some major organizational policy changes to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Read the full article about the stolen GiveDirectly donations by Kelsey Piper at Vox.