Cash+ Financial Inclusion for Refugees
We evaluate GiveDirectly’s Cash+ Financial Inclusion for Refugees project in Nairobi, Kenya. The program, funded by the Ikea Foundation, provides participants with cash transfers and financial literacy training from Equity Bank.
Our Team
Andrew Zeitlin, gui2de
Alex Wendo, gui2de
Aruj Shukla, University of Southern California
Gerald Ipapa, gui2de
Billy Jack, gui2de
Project Information
Location:
Nairobi, Kenya
Timeline:
Nov 2024 – ongoing
Type of Project:
RCT, two-level saturation design
Sample Size:
About 4,000 participants (roughly 70 percent refugees, 30 percent host-community members) in 31 neighborhoods
Partners:
GiveDirectly; Equity Bank; Equity Group Foundation
Funder:
Ikea Foundation
Trial Registration:
Project Overview
Can a large infusion of cash help urban refugees build lasting livelihoods, and can it knit refugee and host communities closer together? This project evaluates GiveDirectly’s refugee cash transfer program in Nairobi, Kenya, in partnership with GiveDirectly, Equity Bank, and the Equity Group Foundation, with funding from the IKEA Foundation.
About 4,000 refugees and host-community Kenyans across 31 Nairobi neighborhoods are taking part. Roughly two-thirds receive an unconditional cash transfer of USD 725 (KES 100,000), delivered in two lump-sum payments alongside a formal Equity Bank account, and half of cash recipients are additionally offered entrepreneurship and financial literacy training from the Equity Group Foundation.
The study measures the direct impact of cash and training on recipients’ businesses, incomes, and well-being. Just as important, its design varies how concentrated the transfers are within each neighborhood, allowing us to ask whether injecting purchasing power into the refugee economy creates demand for neighbors’ businesses and fosters economic and social integration between refugees and their Kenyan hosts.
Background
Conflict, climate change, and economic fragility are driving refugee populations to record levels. East Africa hosts more than 23 million conflict- or climate-displaced people, and Kenya alone hosts nearly 850,000 refugees and asylum seekers, a growing share of them in cities rather than camps. Urban refugees pose a dual policy challenge: how to support the livelihoods of displaced people, and how to encourage their social and economic integration into host communities in ways that avert tension.
Cash transfer programs can help, but on their own they have rarely proved transformative for refugees, and evidence on complementary “cash-plus” training is mixed. This study also asks a question that has received little attention: are refugees’ economic opportunities limited precisely because their customers are also poor? If the refugee economy is segmented from the larger urban market that surrounds it, then concentrated investments in refugee communities may be needed to reach the scale at which business with the host community becomes self-sustaining.
A large body of evidence shows that lump-sum cash grants enable poor households to make investments they could not otherwise finance, particularly where credit markets fail. Whether cash alone is enough is less clear. Refugees may also face gaps in financial access and in the business skills and local market knowledge lost through displacement. This study evaluates a relatively large transfer together with two complements: a formal bank account, and an entrepreneurship and financial literacy training tailored to the context and delivered by the Equity Group Foundation.
Within each study neighborhood, participants were assigned by lottery to one of three groups: a control group, a group receiving an unconditional cash transfer of USD 725 (KES 100,000) in two lump-sum payments, or a group receiving the same transfer plus the Equity Group Foundation training. About 65 percent of the sample receives cash, and the two treatment arms are of roughly equal size. Outcomes are measured in four quarterly survey rounds at 3, 6, 9, and 12 months after treatment, covering employment and business performance, income, household expenditure and food security, savings, debt and financial inclusion, and psychological well-being.
Follow-up data collection runs through 2026. Results will be posted here as they become available.
When many households in a neighborhood receive cash at once, their spending becomes someone else’s revenue. Recent evidence from rural Kenya suggests such demand-side effects of cash transfers can be large. For urban refugees the question has a special edge: if refugee businesses mainly serve other refugees, their fortunes depend on the purchasing power of a poor, segmented market. This study experimentally varies the concentration of transfers within neighborhoods, and across refugee and host communities, to test whether demand constraints limit the returns to cash transfers and whether income growth in one community spills over to the other.
The study’s 31 neighborhoods were randomly assigned to one of five saturation arms that vary the share of refugees and of host-community Kenyans receiving cash: in high-saturation groups most eligible participants receive the transfer, while in low-saturation groups fewer than half do. This creates large, experimentally controlled differences in the amount of cash flowing into each local economy. To trace the effects, we survey recipients and non-recipients alike, track the customers and suppliers that refugee and host businesses trade with across community lines, monitor consumer prices at local retailers on a monthly basis, measure social integration (including sense of belonging, beliefs about whether one group’s gain is the other’s loss, and everyday contact between groups), and follow where participants choose to live and locate their businesses.
Analysis of the saturation experiment will follow the completion of the follow-up surveys. Results will be posted here as they become available.
Project Updates
- April 2026. Pre-analysis plan finalized and study registered at the AEA RCT Registry (AEARCTR-0018370).
- September 2025 – July 2026. Four quarterly follow-up survey rounds, each covering a rotating quarter of the study sample.
- 2025. GiveDirectly began delivering transfers, and Equity Group Foundation training rolled out to the cash-plus-training group.
- December 2024 – May 2025. Enrollment and baseline survey of about 4,000 refugees and host-community members across 31 Nairobi neighborhoods.