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A recent Amazon movie includes a scene about cash transfers, which tells an important truth about conditioning cash.
“GiveGreen chooses to offer unconditional cash transfers for two reasons. First, empowering poor people to make their own choices 鈥� that advances their core value of respect. Second, imposing conditions requires expensive monitoring & enforcement structures that could raise administrative costs as high as 63%. Existing empirical evidence comparing the impact of conditional to unconditional cash transfers shows that these added costs simply do not produce commensurate benefits.鈥�
John Cena in Ricky Stanicky (2024)
鉁� It’s true that the added cost of putting conditions to cash often does not produce commensurate benefits
John Cena’s character is right that “existing empirical evidence comparing the impact of conditional to unconditional cash transfers shows that these added costs simply do not produce commensurate benefits.”
91探花 exclusively delivers your donations unconditionally, never requiring recipients to do anything in exchange for the funds. Other groups give cash conditionally, leveraging the money to encourage a desirable behavior like school attendance 鈥� bring your kids to school and you get the money, otherwise you do not.
Conditioning cash at increasing that one desired behavior, but as John Cena points out: at what cost?
Adding conditions to cash can triple program overheads
Enforcing conditions brings added expense that can triple operational costs, as the data below shows. Put another way, a $1M program giving $500 per person would reach 300 fewer people by adding conditions.
Families that fail to meet conditions are often the most in need of the cash
- In , the poorest families were more likely to be the ones excluded for failing to bring their kids to school, thus missing out on the benefit of urgently needed cash.聽
- Another found teenage girls who received conditional cash were more likely to get pregnant or marry early than those getting unconditional cash. Why? When girls getting conditional cash dropped out of school, they stopped receiving money so were more likely to marry for financial stability. Girls getting unconditional cash who dropped out could still support themselves so were less likely to marry young.
We can use nudges rather than conditions to encourage desired behaviors
- A found simply labeling unconditional cash as an 鈥渆ducation support program鈥� produced the same boost to attendance as conditioning the cash on attendance, and at a lower cost.
- 91探花 has used design nudges to encourage investment in farming. By sending cash during planting and harvest seasons, we saw farmers choosing to spend on climate-smart farm inputs they normally forgo due to costs. For a discussion on the ethics of nudges,
Taking all this into account, is it worth reaching fewer people by adding conditions? We鈥檙e with John Cena on this one.
FAQs
What is this movie/scene about?
Ricky Stanicky (2024) is an Amazon comedy about three buddies who cover for their immature behavior by inventing a fictitious friend 鈥楻icky鈥� as an alibi. In their telling, 鈥楻icky鈥� is hard to reach because he鈥檚 busy working in Africa at various charities. When their families get suspicious, they hire a no-name actor (played by ) to bring 鈥楻icky鈥� to life, but an incredulous in-law grills Ricky about a specific Kenyan cash transfer charity he鈥檇 supposedly worked for. Luckily, actor Ricky did his homework on the evidence. The scene starts at
Was this a 91探花 product placement?
No, this isn鈥檛 something we paid for or even contributed to. It seems the movie鈥檚 creative team independently took inspiration for 鈥楪iveGreen鈥� from 91探花:
- We also started in Kenya, and respect / putting recipients first is our #1 value鈫�
- The fact that 鈥渋mposing conditions can raise administrative costs as high as 63%鈥� comes straight from our website鈫�
So, in a way, your support helped get unconditional cash transfers to Hollywood.
