GiveDirectly is a nonprofit that lets donors send money directly to the world's poorest households. In doing so, they aim to accelerate the end of extreme poverty globally. GiveDirectly’s Emergency Cash program puts dignity and autonomy at the center of disaster response through direct cash transfers. When disasters occur, these transfers empower affected families to decide what they need most. Cash assistance marks a change in crisis response, moving from fixed aid packages to solutions that respect the choices and knowledge of people affected by crises.
GiveDirectly aims to test and adopt new approaches to detect crises, assess needs, and target assistance quickly and effectively as disasters unfold.
DFS partners with GiveDirectly to develop and refine analysis systems that deliver faster, more effective emergency cash responses worldwide. Our collaboration focuses on creating decision-support tools and analysis that enable GiveDirectly to identify emerging crises and respond with informed, ethical, and data-driven interventions.
We offer analysis and technical expertise in developing AI systems, always focusing on ethics, accuracy, transparency, and accountability. Our work helps close the gap between slow, traditional needs assessments and the urgent needs of disaster response, where help is needed within days. Importantly, we see technology as a tool that supports, rather than replaces, human judgment and local knowledge. This ensures that quick responses do not come at the cost of careful analysis about who gets help and when.
Ethical AI-Driven Crisis Analysis
DFS brings experience integrating AI technologies into crisis response operations, combining deep sector expertise with technical innovation to help GiveDirectly design tools to detect and assess crises more rapidly. These systems leverage ethical AI practices to process diverse data sources, identify emerging needs, and support evidence-based decision-making. We employ rigorous human-in-the-loop methodologies at every stage: AI systems aggregate and synthesize information from curated humanitarian datasets, but trained analysts validate outputs, interpret contextual nuances, and make final determinations before any assessment reaches decision-makers. We make sure our systems meet high standards for accuracy, reduce bias, and stay transparent, knowing that these tools help make decisions that affect vulnerable people. This approach recognizes that while AI can dramatically accelerate data processing and pattern recognition, human judgment remains essential for navigating the complexity of humanitarian contexts.
Accelerated Response Frameworks
We work closely with GiveDirectly's Emergency Cash team to design workflows and analytical tools that compress traditional data gathering timelines from weeks to days. This acceleration does not sacrifice quality; instead, it leverages technology to synthesize information more efficiently while maintaining the human oversight necessary for contextual understanding and ethical decision-making.
Our AI systems leverage carefully selected data, combining trusted sources, specialized platforms, real-time media, and verified local information. This mix helps our tools create accurate reports that reflect real conditions as they change.
Decision-Support Tool Development
Our systems function as decision-support mechanisms that augment human expertise. We build tools that surface critical information, highlight patterns, and provide analytical insights while ensuring that GiveDirectly drives response strategies. A core component of this work is supporting GiveDirectly’s operational feasibility assessments. Our tools help the Emergency Cash team systematically evaluate key feasibility indicators.
By systematically documenting these feasibility dimensions and explicitly noting data gaps and limitations, we help ensure that response decisions are grounded in operational reality. This keeps technology in service of GiveDirectly’s principles, providing decision-makers with the situational awareness needed for operational planning.
The partnership between DFS and GiveDirectly demonstrates that well-designed technology can speed up emergency response while respecting the dignity and choices of people in crisis. By reducing the time from crisis impact to cash delivery, this collaboration helps people get resources when they need them most in the wake of a disaster. The speed enabled by our analytical systems, combined with the dignity inherent in cash assistance, creates a multiplier effect that amplifies the impact of every dollar delivered.
Beyond helping individuals, this work supports bigger changes in how crisis response is done. It shows that using AI ethically can strengthen, not weaken, the focus on people. By proving technology can be a responsible tool in emergencies, this partnership sets new standards for using innovation while keeping accountability, transparency, and respect for people at the center.
