Rad Geek People's Daily

I wrote a post a while back about GiveDirectly’s international Covid-19 emergency relief project for low-income families affected by pandemic Covid-19 and the economic effects of disease control measures. I’m a monthly contributor to GiveDirectly, but I’ve also tried to put aside at least $10 more each week to chip in for those special project funds.

Now, GiveDirectly has also launched its international Covid-19 response, a relief fund which delivers cash through safe mobile payments directly to extremely poor informal-sector workers, starting in Nairobi, Kenya. From their site:

We're delivering cash quickly and safely using mobile money to families impacted by COVID-19 in Africa.

We're responding to this crisis by doing what we've done for a decade: delivering cash.

As governments impose lockdowns to limit the spread of COVID-19, many families will suddenly be unable to continue earning a living. Few will have the financial resources to weather this storm, let alone provide care if a family member falls ill. To make matters worse, traditional aid programs that rely on face-to-face interaction may need to scale back at the same time.

This is the moment for digital cash. To protect the safety of recipients and staff, all enrollment and payment processes will be conducted remotely from end-to-end. To begin, we're targeting low-income, informal sector workers in urban areas.

We will focus first on urban areas, where we expect the economic impacts of COVID-19 will hit first and hardest. We'll coordinate with local governments and NGOs to identify and prioritize underserved groups. To start, we're enrolling recipients in Nairobi slums — mostly youth — in partnership with SHOFCO.

We're using a basic income model as a short-term assistance solution.

Each household will receive $25-50 per month (dependent on location), initially for 3 months. We expect the main constraint on how many we can reach will be how much we can raise.

Send cash now

Send funds directly to those hardest hit by the economic effects of COVID-19.

Give now

— GiveDirectly, COVID-19 international response
World Wide Web. Accessed April 9, 2020.

This week I sent $10 each to the U.S. relief fund and to the new international response fund. So far, as of Thursday, April 9, GiveDirectly has gotten help to 2,064 families and raised $2,294,224 for the relief projects. Whatever you can afford to give in the coming days, you can help them to do even more.