What happens when you hand a poor adult $550 and let them decide what to do with it, no conditions attached? In Malawi, the results have been striking enough to convince two Australian billionaires to keep scaling the experiment well past where it started.
Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht, the couple behind design platform Canva, have now committed $150 million to what’s being called the world’s largest unconditional cash transfer programme in a low-income country. The initiative runs through the Canva Foundation in partnership with nonprofit GiveDirectly, with payments sent straight to recipients’ mobile phones and no restrictions on how the money gets spent.
The programme didn’t start at this scale. It began in 2021 as a $10 million pilot testing whether direct, no-strings cash transfers could genuinely move families out of extreme poverty. The early results were encouraging enough that Perkins and Obrecht committed a further $20 million in 2023. By October 2025, Canva said it had donated a cumulative $50 million to GiveDirectly’s work in Malawi, and that same month, pledged another $100 million, the single largest donation in GiveDirectly’s history.
The programme has now reached more than 139,000 people across Malawi. The most striking data point comes from Khongoni sub-district, where every single adult received a cash transfer: GiveDirectly reported that 90% of recipients moved above the extreme poverty line within just three months of getting the money.
The giving fits a pattern the couple set years ago. Perkins and Obrecht signed The Giving Pledge in 2021, committing to give away most of their wealth through the Canva Foundation. Each holds roughly an 18% stake in Canva, together worth around $15 billion, and both have pledged to donate more than 80% of their personal wealth over what Perkins describes as a lifetime commitment to giving.
“Step One is to build one of the world’s most valuable companies. Step Two is to do the most good we can,” the couple said, describing more than 30% of Canva’s total value as now committed to social impact, a philosophy they say has shaped the company itself, not just its charitable arm.
Cameron Adams, Canva’s third co-founder, holds a roughly 9% stake worth around $3.8 billion and has separately pledged to give away most of his wealth as well, independent of the Canva Foundation. Beyond the Malawi programme, Canva says it has donated $2.5 billion in product value to students, teachers, and more than a million nonprofit organisations worldwide.
The founders have also launched the Global Goals Platform, funded through the Canva Foundation, which asks people around the world what changes they’d most want to see in their communities and countries, with the aim of letting those responses guide where future giving goes, as the foundation works toward its stated goal of eventually donating a 30% stake in Canva.
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