A Sovereign Good analysis of the world’s largest unconditional cash transfer program in a low-income country — what it got right, what the critics get wrong, and what it means for the future of strategic philanthropy.
By Joanna Aguirre | Principal and Co-Founder
Married co-founders of Canva, Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht, wired $10 million directly to 12,800 adults living in extreme poverty in Malawi, a southeast African country, via the Canva Foundation in 2021. No conditions or oversight on spending categories to start, and despite critics' warnings, minimal inflation was reported in the local economy by the end of the pilot. That last point matters: one of the persistent criticisms of large-scale cash programs is that injecting currency into a low-supply rural economy raises prices, negating the benefit.
Four years and $150 million later, the results are producing some of the most compelling data in the history of development economics.
The Canva Foundation’s Malawi program is a model of phased, evidence-driven strategic philanthropy. It began as a pilot. It produced data. It used that data to justify scale. It partnered with an organization that had the operational infrastructure it lacked. It engaged government as a co-partner rather than an obstacle. And it committed to independent, randomized research so that the findings benefit the entire field, not just the foundation’s reputation.
At Sovereign Good, this is exactly the architecture we help donors and foundations build — across borders, sectors, and across the full complexity of what it takes to work effectively with foreign governments, local communities, and international implementation partners. Program design at this level requires strategic partnerships, rigorous measurement frameworks, and the kind of sustained commitment that outlasts the first press release.
The Pilot-to-Scale Architecture: How You Build Something This Large
The Canva Foundation’s Malawi program did not begin as a $150 million commitment, but as a $10 million question.
In 2021, in partnership with GiveDirectly, a nonprofit with over a decade of operational expertise delivering unconditional cash transfers to households in extreme poverty across Africa, the foundation launched a pilot in Khongoni, a sub-district in rural Malawi. The mechanics were deliberately simple: approximately $50 per month, delivered to adults’ mobile phones for 12 months, no conditions attached. The pilot enrolled 12,800 people and simultaneously tested three different methods for identifying and targeting recipients in poverty — a data problem as important as the giving itself.
The early results were striking. In Khongoni, the number of people living above the extreme poverty line doubled within 12 months of transfers. Encouraged, Perkins and Obrecht announced a further $20 million commitment, and by October 2025, cumulative giving to the GiveDirectly partnership had reached $50 million, and more than 130,000 people. That same month, the foundation made what GiveDirectly described as the largest single gift in its history: a $100 million anchor commitment to scale the program to cover an entire district in Malawi — reaching 185,000 people and launching the largest-ever randomized controlled trial on unconditional cash anywhere in the world.
The Partnerships That Make It Work
The Canva Foundation leveraged an already existing field operation in Africa that enabled program launch in months rather than years.
GiveDirectly was founded by economists who believed the most efficient anti-poverty intervention was also the most obvious one: give people money. The organization has since delivered over $700 million in cash transfers across multiple countries, building the mobile payment infrastructure, recipient identification systems, and independent research partnerships that large-scale cash delivery requires.
The program also operates in coordination with the Malawian government to navigate district-level data, work within existing community structures, and ensure the program’s geographic expansion doesn’t conflict with national social protection systems. This makes the district-scale model possible and the research findings meaningful for future national policy.
The foundation’s complementary education investments in Malawi — $18.4 million in foundational literacy and numeracy programs since 2023 quietly align with the 23% increase in school enrollment accomplished by the program thus far.
The Objections and What the Data Actually Shows
The most common objection is unsupported by evidence: that people in poverty will waste money on alcohol or other “temptation goods.” Research across eight countries in sub-Saharan Africa, reviewed by the Transfer Project and published at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), found no consistent pattern of increased spending on alcohol or tobacco following cash transfers. A separate U.S. study of low-income mothers receiving monthly cash payments found no increase in substance use. The assumption that poor people spend irresponsibly is a bias.
The second objection is macroeconomic: that flooding rural markets with cash causes inflation. This pilot showed minimal inflation, consistent with the broader literature. The Transfer Project found that for every $1,000 transferred, local economies grew to $2,520 because recipients spend money locally and it circulates within the community.
The third concern is that cash solves immediate need without building long-term capacity, and that families will return to poverty once transfers end. This is the most legitimate critique, and the Canva Foundation’s complementary education and literacy investments are a direct response to it.
The fourth concern is scale: that what works in a pilot may not survive the complexity of a full district. That is precisely what the current $100 million phase is designed to test — with the largest randomized controlled trial ever conducted on unconditional cash as the evidentiary backbone.
The Full Picture: What Else the Canva Foundation Is Building
The Malawi program represents the foundation’s flagship commitment, but it is not the sum of its giving. By 2025, the Canva Foundation had disbursed more than $80 million in total, including over $2.5 billion in donated product value to more than one million nonprofits and students and teachers in 190 countries. Canva Education remains free for K-12 educators and students globally. Canva for Nonprofits provides free access to up to 50 team members per organization.
The foundation also funds crisis response globally, employee skills-based volunteering, including a first-of-its-kind prison coding program in New South Wales, and a dollar-for-dollar employee gift-matching program that delivered $758,000 to employee-chosen causes in 2025 alone. In July 2026, Perkins and Obrecht announced the Global Goals Platform: a participatory initiative surveying citizens worldwide about the changes they most want to see, grounded in the conviction that communities — not foundations — should identify the priorities.
Their approach to giving was baked into the business from the beginning, and so, Canva joined Pledge 1%, committing 1% of equity, profits, employee time, and product to philanthropy. Since then, they've signed the Giving Pledge, joining Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates in a commitment to give away the majority of their wealth, and allocated a 30% equity stake in Canva directly to the Canva Foundation. At a $42 billion valuation, that stake is worth over $12 billion.
What Sovereign Good Sees Here — and What We Can Build
The Canva Foundation’s Malawi program is a model of phased, evidence-driven strategic philanthropy. It began as a pilot. It produced data. It used that data to justify scale. It partnered with an organization that had the operational infrastructure it lacked. It engaged government as a co-partner rather than an obstacle. And it committed to independent, randomized research so that the findings benefit the entire field, not just the foundation’s reputation.
The most important thing Perkins and Obrecht did wasn’t write a check. It was to decide, years before the results were in, that the people receiving the money were the right ones to decide what to do with it.
That is not a radical idea. It is the most logical one. And it is, increasingly, what the evidence supports.
If you’re ready to move wealth with thoughtful intention, we’re ready to help you build. Explore our work at sovereigngood.org.