Could it be that helping poor countries is simpler than we think?

I saw a headline that Facebook billionaire Dustin Moskovitz just gave $25 million to an organization called GiveDirectly. Which I’d never heard of, so I looked it up. And it’s a pretty radical concept.

Everybody knows the old adage that if you give a man a fish, he eats for a day, but if you teach him to fish, he eats for a lifetime. What nobody considers is that maxim assumes there’s a place to fish, a way to get there, that nobody else owns the fish, and that the guy even likes seafood.

So GiveDirectly keeps it simple.

“Cash given with no strings attached,” Joy Sun said at a recent TED Talk. Sun helped launch the organization.

They give cash and then let that poor person decide whether to buy the fish or the rod.

Sun, a former aid worker, began to question whether what she was doing was really helping anyone. For example, some charities go to a lot of trouble to give poor people livestock.

“Thirty percent of recipients turned around and sold the livestock they had been given for cash,” Sun said.

So as CEO of GiveDirectly, she locates the most impoverished, gives them a cell phone, and then wires $1,000 to them. It’s a one-time gift, no strings. And as for the idea that the money would just be squandered? Well, there are studies on that.

“None of these studies found that people spent more on drinking or that people work less,” Sun said.

Makes sense to me. I visited my daughter when she was in the Peace Corps and realized that most of us in America had no clue what people in the Third World need.

In fact, you go to a mall right after Christmas and you realize we can’t even figure out what people in the First World need.