Canva to donate $100M over 4 years to GiveDirectly

Thanks for sharing, really energising to see. Their blog post has really nice illustrations, sharing some of them below.

These are some of the results from the $50M they've donated so far to GiveDirectly to every adult in the Khongoni subdistrict of Malawi:

This was what they spent it on:

This is the framework Canva came up with to track impact on recipients via continuous surveys:

In the next phase with their $100M commitment to GiveDirectly, these are some of the research questions they're helping GD explore:

And from GiveDirectly's side of the story — the first 2 phases were funded entirely by Canva:

Despite doubling Khongoni's local GDP, inflation was negligible; quoting GD:

Markets were able to absorb large-scale transfers without driving significant price inflation. That gives us strong evidence that this model can be scaled responsibly and rapidly without triggering harmful inflation.

This stability was a product of how recipients and markets responded:

• 🗓️ Recipients didn’t spend all at once: Findings showed households did not spend all of the transfer immediately and gradually increased their spending over months.
• 🚲 They also shopped around: Recipients had access to multiple markets, locally and in nearby Lilongwe city, allowing them to choose between sellers if someone didn’t have what they needed or tried to raise prices.
• 🤝 Vendors chose not to raise prices: Traders reported keeping prices steady to maintain trust, saying opportunistic hikes would damage their reputation once the cash was gone.
• 📦 Markets adapted to demand: Many vendors simply ordered more stock and new traders entered markets, both without significantly driving up prices.

I'm a fan of cash transfers and think it's a tad underrated in EA circles, so I'll end by quoting Canva on cash:

In over 500 randomised controlled trials, direct cash transfers have significantly improved lives:

• Child mortality dropped by 48%, and infant mortality dropped by 57% (Walker et al.,2025) .
• Incomes more than doubled (McIntosh et al., 2023)
• School enrolment rose by 23% (Baird et al., 2014)
• Domestic violence dropped by 3% (Haushofer et al., 2019)
• Illness dropped by 27% (Pega et al., 2017)
• Wellbeing and mental health significantly improved (Zimmerman et al., 2021)
• Economic activity increased by $2.50 for every $1.00 transferred in rural Kenya (Egger et al., 2022)

You might be wondering why cash transfers are able to have an impact in so many different areas. We believe the impact lies in giving people the autonomy to choose what they need most. In all the examples we’ve seen, each person put the money towards ensuring they and their families were able to access their most basic needs while also putting the money to work to generate income in an ongoing manner.

Research shows the cost-effectiveness of cash transfers continues to be elevated upwards to show more impact. Last year, GiveWell reviewed the latest evidence from GiveDirectly and increased their estimates of cost-effectiveness by 3 to 4 times.

Love to see it.

The true valuation is probably a lot more than $26b USD - there was recently a secondary sale which valued company at closer to 42 billion. If the company became public, and were to trade at a revenue multiple similar to Figma's (extremely high at like 30x right now) - this would set the company's valuation a lot higher than that

See updated comment: I stand corrected and I apologise for my mistake. An earlier article I wrote sounded like this was PFG (the way I read it is that they gave away 30% of the stock to a foundation), but this is basically a founders pledge. The 30% might diminish with dilution with new investor rounds. 

Still great, but not exactly what we called PFG when we envisioned it, and next time I will read more carefully. 

Old comment: 
@Marcus Abramovitch 🔸 how do we reconcile this profit for good success (8 billion estimated future value to effective charities) with criticism on profit for good being an inefficient way to fund charities?

I expect 99% of Canva users and most of its employees to choose Canva because of price/quality and pay, but even then there's a small and compounding upside to adopting this model over a Canva with no charity beneficiaries?