Rory Stewart is highly ambitious and talks a very big game. Give a billion dollars to his organization, GiveDirectly, to prove cash transfers work at scale as a rapid and transformatory aid tool, and he believes the world can end extreme poverty by 2050.
The first goal is to take an entire country out of extreme poverty using cash transfers, Stewart tells Devex via Zoom. The United Kingdom's former international development secretary, albeit for a brief term in 2019, recently began a new job as chief executive of GiveDirectly, an organization that specializes in cash transfers, in a coup for a sector that was once seen as fringe.
GiveDirectly’s purpose, in Stewart’s vision, is to show that the world can end extreme poverty — the “fundamental human shame of our age” — with cash transfers playing a critical role and being used for a majority of the world’s aid spend.