How Canva's billionaire founders are handing $150 million in cash to Malawi's poorest

The billionaire couple behind Canva are pouring $150 million into an experiment on the ground in Malawi, handing money directly to some of the poorest people on earth and letting them decide what to do with it.

Cliff Obrecht and Melanie Perkins, the married co-founders of the Australian design software giant, have run the effort since 2021 through their Canva Foundation, in partnership with the nonprofit GiveDirectly. What began as a $10 million pilot has grown into the largest unconditional cash transfer program ever attempted in a low-income country.

The mechanics are deliberately simple. Rather than build schools or ship food, the program sends money straight to recipients over mobile phones, with no conditions attached. Each adult in the target area receives about $550, a life-changing sum in a country where millions live on far less than that in a year, and spends it however they choose.

The scale has climbed in stages. The couple committed $50 million to the work between 2021 and 2023, then added a $100 million anchor commitment in October 2025, the largest single gift in GiveDirectly's history. Of the money pledged, $52.5 million has actually been delivered to Malawians since 2023, with the rest flowing over the next four years.

What the money has done so far is the part the founders point to. In the Khongoni sub-district, where the program paid every adult, GiveDirectly reported that 90 percent of recipients had risen above the extreme poverty line three months after receiving the cash. It recorded a 48 percent drop in child mortality, a 27 percent fall in illness and a 23 percent rise in school enrolment. Across the wider effort, the Canva Foundation says the transfers have reached more than 139,000 people.

The economic ripple is what has drawn the most attention from researchers. A study of the Malawi work found that for every $1,000 handed to a person in poverty, the local economy grew by about $2,400, as recipients spent and reinvested the money with neighbouring traders and businesses. The founders have said they want to test whether districtwide payments can reproduce the 2.5 times economic multiplier that an earlier GiveDirectly program generated in Kenya.

A common fear about flooding a poor area with cash did not materialise. Despite doubling Khongoni's local output, GiveDirectly reported that inflation was negligible, because markets absorbed the money and households spent gradually rather than all at once. The organisation described that as strong evidence the model can be scaled quickly without driving up prices.

The next phase is bigger and built as a formal study. The program has moved to Malawi's Chiradzulu district, where it aims to reach 185,000 people by early 2027 in what GiveDirectly calls the largest randomised controlled trial ever run on unconditional cash. The design, coordinated with the Malawi government, will test which extra measures, from technical assistance to community grants, add the most to the impact of the cash itself.

The couple's story sits behind the giving. Perkins pitched Canva to more than 100 venture capitalists who turned her down before she and Obrecht raised their first round in 2013 and launched the company in Sydney. Canva now has some 260 million users and about $3.5 billion in annualised revenue, and an employee share sale in 2025 valued it at $42 billion, making it one of the most valuable private technology companies in the world. An initial public offering is widely expected in the coming years.

Their wealth has grown with it. Obrecht and Perkins together hold about 30 percent of Canva, a stake that has placed them among Australia's ten richest people, with joint paper fortunes estimated in recent years at more than $11 billion. Their fellow co-founder, Cameron Adams, is himself a billionaire.

They have framed the money as never really theirs. In 2021, the pair signed the Giving Pledge and committed to give away the vast majority of their equity, roughly 30 percent of Canva, through the foundation, under a philosophy they call the Two-Step Plan: build one of the world's most valuable companies, then do the most good possible with the proceeds. Perkins has said it has always felt strange to be called a billionaire, describing herself and her husband as custodians of the wealth rather than its owners.

Malawi is a pointed choice for the bet. One of the poorest countries in the world, it is landlocked, heavily dependent on rain-fed agriculture and repeatedly battered by drought and cyclones. GiveDirectly has worked there since 2019 and says it has now delivered more than $101 million in cash to over 226,000 households across the country, often alongside the Malawian government.

The approach is not without critics. Cash transfer programs have long faced questions about whether gains persist once the payments stop, whether one-off windfalls change behaviour in lasting ways, and whether direct giving lets governments off the hook for building services. GiveDirectly's own model relies on self-reported data in places, a limitation economists have flagged, which is part of why the Chiradzulu trial is being run as rigorous research rather than a simple handout.

What the Canva founders are ultimately testing is an argument about poverty itself, that the people living in it know best what they need, and that the fastest way to help is to trust them with the money. The results coming out of Malawi will shape whether other billionaires and governments follow them, and the next set of answers is due when the districtwide trial reports in 2027.