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This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.

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The details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use,

go to BBCworldservice. com slash podcasts. and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service. I'm Ruth

Alexander. A few years ago a group of postgraduate students at MIT in the

United States were chatting about what might be the best way to give aid in Africa.

With so many well-meaning charities from the US and Europe arriving with their various ideas

of how to help people out of poverty. How do you choose which is the best way?

What if, they reasoned, instead of presuming aid workers know best, why not just give cash to the extreme poor and allow them

to make their own decisions about how to spend it? It was both

potentially desirable and also feasible now to get money directly into

the hands of really poor people in a way that was never before possible.

This is Paul Nei House. He and his fellow student set up a charity called Give Directly where they arranged to give up to a

thousand dollars to poor families in rural Kenya. This wasn't the first time that

organizations had given cash direct to poor people, but in previous programs usually

there were strings attached. But for Paul and his colleagues their condition

...