Give Directly is a well respected charity founded on the principle of direct cash transfers as a form of aid.
I’ve met with the founders before and I really like their philosophy. Their position is that direct cash transfer should be the null hypothesis of the charity world. That is, any charitable intervention should meet a minimum threshold that it does at least as well as direct cash transfer to be considered credible.
In order to do that, Give Directly is gathering data on the exact impact of direct cash transfer and showing that many commonly popular charity interventions are not as effective as direct cash transfer. According to Givewell, there are only 3 charity interventions that have strong evidence that they perform substantially better than Give Directly.