**What GiveDirectly says:**


>This study documented large, positive, and sustainable impacts across a wide range of outcomes including assets, earnings, food security, **    mental health**, and domestic violence. It found no evidence of impacts on alcohol or tobacco use, crime, or inflation. It also examined a number of design questions such as how to size transfers and whether to give them to men or women.

Source: [GiveDirectly](https://www.givedirectly.org/research-at-give-directly.html)

**What the evidence says:**

*GiveDirectly*

>Overall, GiveDirectly increased households’ assets, consumption, and food security. The program also improved psychological well-being, especially among households with female recipients and households that received the large transfer. GiveDirectly had no impact on health or education measures.

>Psychological impacts: GiveDirectly households reported a 0.2 standard deviation increase (0.35 sd for large transfer recipients) on an index measuring psychological well-being. This improvement was largely driven by increases in happiness and life satisfaction, and reductions in stress and depression. There were no differences in self-reported measures between monthly-transfer and lump-sum recipients, but cortisol levels were significantly higher for monthly-transfer recipients. A potential explanation being that the monthly-transfer recipients seemed to have difficulty saving or investing the transfer, which may have led to increased stress.

Source: [Innovations for Poverty Action](http://www.poverty-action.org/project/0522)

*SCI*

>There is a very strong case that mass deworming is effective in reducing infections. The evidence on the connection to positive quality-of-life impacts is less clear, but there is a fairly strong possibility that deworming is highly beneficial.

>There is strong evidence that administration of the drugs reduces worm loads, but weaker evidence on the causal relationship between reducing worm loads and improved life outcomes.

>Evidence for the impact of deworming on short-term general health is thin, especially for soil-transmitted helminth (STH)-only deworming. Most of the potential effects are relatively small, the evidence is mixed, and different approaches have varied effects. We would guess that deworming populations with schistosomiasis and STH (combination deworming) does have some small impacts on general health, but do not believe it has a large impact on health in most cases. We are uncertain that STH-only deworming affects general health.

>In our view, the most compelling case for deworming as a cost-effective intervention comes not from its subtle impacts on general health (which appear relatively minor and uncertain) nor from its potential reduction in severe symptoms of disease effects (which we believe to be rare), but from the possibility that deworming children has a subtle, lasting impact on their development, and thus on their ability to be productive and successful throughout life.

>Community deworming before a child’s first birthday brings about a 0.2-standard-deviation improvement in performance on Raven’s Matrices, a decade after the intervention. Estimated effects on vocabulary measures are similar in magnitude, but not always as significant; effects on memory are not statistically distinguishable from zero. A summary measure, the first principal component of all six cognitive measurements, also shows a roughly 0.2-standard-deviation effect. These effects are equivalent to between 0.5 and 0.8 additional grades in school … The effect of community deworming spillovers on height, height-for-age, and stunting all appear statistically

Source: [GiveWell](http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/schistosomiasis-control-initiative).

GiveWell goes on to argue that this leads to improvements in income. In turn, I would expect that this leads to increases in income, assets and consumption with consequences similar to direct cash transfers as in the case of GiveDirectly.