A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
All right. How's this for an idea? Instead of giving food or shelter to people living in poverty, why not just give them cash instead? That idea got traction, particularly with help sent overseas, as researchers kept showing that it can work. As NPR's Jonathan Lambert reports, the Trump administration's cuts to foreign aid threaten to reverse that trend.
JONATHAN LAMBERT, BYLINE: On a busy day in his barbershop, Isac Luis can cut as many as 20 people's hair. Customers from his rural village in Mozambique can pick a hairstyle from posters on the wall and listen to music as Luis works. On such days, he can make as much as 10 U.S. dollars, way more than he made before the barbershop opened.
ISAC LUIS: (Non-English language spoken).
LAMBERT: He says that "if before the barbershop my life weighed 1 kilogram, now it's 2 or 3 kilograms." What made the difference? A thousand bucks. The money came from USAID through the nonprofit GiveDirectly. Luis used the cash to create this thriving business from scratch. Now he no longer lives in poverty, and he says...
LUIS: (Laughter).
LAMBERT: ...He's happy. GiveDirectly was supposed to help thousands more people like Luis with $20 million from the U.S. government, but then the Trump administration began cutting aid. Yolande Wright is with GiveDirectly.
YOLANDE WRIGHT: Pure cash programs were hard hit. None of our pure cash programs continued, for example, under the cuts.
LAMBERT: GiveDirectly is one of the biggest players in cash assistance, and the cuts are a major blow. Partly, that's because direct cash aid seemed poised to go mainstream. For years, humanitarian agencies balked at the idea of just giving people money out of fear that recipients would misspend it. But last fall, USAID formally embraced the strategy. The change was brought on in part by evidence that cash works.
WRIGHT: I think cash is one of the really few tools that are incredibly well evidenced, and there's, like, undeniable amounts of evidence, like, hundreds of studies.
LAMBERT: Studies which show that cash transfers can put more money in people's pockets, help them buy better food, save more and afford health care. From the perspective of governments...
WRIGHT: You genuinely can do more with less aid spending.
LAMBERT: Amid massive cuts to foreign assistance, some advocates are trying to make the case for cash aid to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
WRIGHT: Particularly if you're someone who believes in giving people the right to kind of work hard and work their way out of poverty, actually, cash really does support that.
LAMBERT: It's still somewhat unclear what the Trump administration will do. In a statement to NPR, the State Department said they'd be moving away from cash assistance. But Secretary of State Marco Rubio seemed open to the simplicity of direct cash giving when criticizing USAID's bureaucracy. He was speaking at a congressional hearing in May.
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MARCO RUBIO: Some of these projects had a prime contractor who had a sub, who had a sub, who had a sub, who had a sub, who had a local provider. That's crazy. That's lunacy. I think we can get it maybe from the prime to the sub - in some cases, directly to the group on the ground.
LAMBERT: Advocates see an opening in that line of thinking, that simply giving people cash is a way to cut out the bureaucratic middleman. Daniel Handel is with the nonprofit Unlock Aid, which advocates for foreign assistance reform.
DANIEL HANDEL: Cash transfers is a really promising approach. We really are empowering individuals and families and getting the top-down bureaucracy out of the way.
LAMBERT: Even if the Trump administration moves away from this approach, advocates say the idea of giving people money won't go away. There will just be fewer stories like Isac Luis' of people getting the opportunity to transform their lives with some extra cash.
Jonathan Lambert, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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