Rwanda study is the latest evidence for just giving people money

For the last several years, more and more experts have argued that we should be checking something else: whether a given intervention is more effective than just taking the money you would have spent on that intervention, dividing it up evenly, and giving it to the intended beneficiaries as cash. In other words, is the intervention you’re implementing actually better than just giving people money?

This is called “cash benchmarking.” The idea is that people often know what’s best for them, and by giving them money, they can spend it whatever way best meets their family’s needs. We should introduce other aid programs only when we can demonstrate that they do more good than cash itself. Sometimes they do; often they don’t.

Source: A new study from Rwanda is the latest evidence for just giving people money – Vox