$150 million gift, no strings attached: how Canva’s Melanie Perkins is rewriting the rules of giving — one cash transfer at a time

She grew up in Perth, Australia — a city on the far western edge of a continent most of the world barely thinks about when it comes to tech innovation.

Her mother was a Malaysian-born engineer of Filipino and Sri Lankan descent, and her father was an Australian teacher.

From that cross-cultural upbringing, Melanie Perkins absorbed an instinct for bridging worlds—between the complicated and the simple, between the privileged and the overlooked, between the dream and the thing that actually gets built.

Long before she became a billionaire, she sold hand-sewn scarves at fourteen and tutored university students through the baffling labyrinth of Adobe Photoshop. She didn’t just see a business opportunity in their frustration. She felt it.

That empathy — bone-deep, unhurried, quietly radical — is the thread running through everything Perkins has done since.

It powered the founding of Canva in 2013, the graphic design platform she built with her now-husband Cliff Obrecht after more than 100 investor rejections.

And it is that same empathy driving what many observers are calling one of the most audacious humanitarian experiments in a generation: a $150 million commitment to put cash, unconditionally and directly, into the hands of Malawi’s poorest adults—no bureaucratic intermediary, no government program, no charity official deciding what a family ought to do with help. Just money and trust.

Melanie Perkins—who graced the cover of Lifestyles Magazine/Meaningful Influence in a recent exclusive—is not your archetypal billionaire philanthropist. She does not hold galas. She does not accept honorary titles gracefully at podiums. What she does, with a focus that has become something of a hallmark, is think rigorously about what actually works. And the answer, in her case and Obrecht’s, has become both simple and startling: give people money.

The program began in 2021 as a $10 million pilot through the Canva Foundation’s partnership with GiveDirectly, the nonprofit that pioneered direct cash transfers across East Africa.

The concept was modest in scope but radical in philosophy—identify the poorest households in Malawi, send them money via mobile phone, and then step back. No conditions. No requirements. No one telling a mother of four in a rural village outside Blantyre that she must spend her transfer on approved items, prove her compliance to an inspector, or attend classes in financial literacy before receiving her next payment. The philosophy rested on a simple, if heretical-sounding, premise: people who are poor are not poor because they make bad decisions.

They are poor because they do not have money.

Between 2021 and 2023, the couple committed $50 million, scaling the pilot into a genuine program. Then, in October 2025, they did something that sent a tremor through the global philanthropic community: they pledged an additional $100 million, the single largest donation in GiveDirectly’s history, bringing their total commitment to $150 million.

Today, more than $52.5 million has already been delivered directly to Malawian households, with the remainder flowing over the next four years.

The scale of the ambition is almost difficult to absorb. Each adult recipient receives approximately $550 — a figure that, in rural Malawi, can represent more than a year’s income for many families.

The new phase of the program is targeting Malawi’s Chiradzulu district, aiming to reach 185,000 people by early 2027 in what GiveDirectly has described as the world’s largest randomized controlled trial of unconditional cash transfers ever attempted in a low-income country.

Crucially, it is being conducted in partnership with the Malawian government itself, which adds both legitimacy and the possibility of institutionalization—the prospect that, if it works, a national government might eventually absorb and sustain the model.

The early results from the Khongoni sub-district, where the program paid every adult in the area, have been nothing short of extraordinary. GiveDirectly reported that within three months of receiving their cash, 90 percent of recipients had risen above the extreme poverty line.

Child mortality fell by 48 percent. Illness rates dropped 27 percent. School enrollment rose 23 percent. Critics of direct cash programs have long worried about two things above all: inflation and dependency. In Khongoni, neither materialized in meaningful form.

Despite an influx of money that effectively doubled local economic output, markets absorbed the spending gradually, and price levels remained stable.

Researchers studying the broader dynamics found that for every $1,000 transferred to a recipient, approximately $2,400 in local economic activity was generated — a multiplier effect that rivals the return on many traditional development investments.

To understand why Perkins and Obrecht arrived here—at this specific program, in this specific country—you have to understand the philosophy that has quietly organized their entire adult lives.

They call it the Two-Step Plan, and they speak of it with a directness that cuts through the usual corporate gloss.

Step One: Build one of the world’s most valuable companies.

Step Two: Do the most good we can.

These are not sequential.

They are, in their telling, mutually reinforcing—the growth of Canva increases the resources available for good, and the act of doing good attracts people to Canva who want their work to mean something beyond a salary.

Canva is valued at approximately $42 billion today, with more than 260 million users globally, annualized revenue exceeding $3.5 billion, and eight consecutive years of profitability. It is one of the most successful technology companies ever built in Australia, and an IPO — long anticipated — is described by Obrecht as “imminent in the next couple of years,” with 2026 frequently cited as the likely window.

The implications for their philanthropic capacity are staggering. Perkins and Obrecht each hold roughly 18 percent stakes in the company, and they have pledged to transfer more than 80 percent of that stake to the Canva Foundation for charitable causes. When a public offering eventually arrives, the foundation’s resources will expand enormously—and much of that funding is already earmarked for the kind of work underway in Chiradzulu.

Perkins has spoken with unusual candor about what motivated this commitment, running counter to the philanthropic conventions of her generation. “If the whole thing were about building wealth, that would be the most uninspiring thing I could possibly imagine,” she has said.

Obrecht, for his part, famously proposed to her with a $30 ring in Turkey—a small and telling detail about a couple for whom the accumulation of personal luxury has never been the point. They signed the Giving Pledge in 2021, joining Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates in a framework for billionaires committing the majority of their fortunes to philanthropy—but their approach, characteristically, leans more heavily on evidence than sentiment.

The question they are asking in Malawi is not a new one in development economics. Brazil’s Bolsa Família showed decades ago that direct payments to poor families can reduce poverty at a national scale, and versions of the program now operate across Latin America.

A meta-analysis of 115 studies on unconditional cash transfers, published in 2025, found consistent positive impacts on consumption, income, labor supply, and child health and education.

GiveWell, the rigorous charity evaluator, increased its rating of GiveDirectly’s cost-effectiveness by three to four times in early 2026 following a reassessment of the evidence base. What Malawi represents is the logical next step — taking the model out of small-scale pilots and into the full complexity of an entire district, with all the supply chain challenges, community dynamics, and political sensitivities that entails.

The timing is not incidental. Across the Western world, traditional foreign aid budgets have been slashed with startling speed. Development institutions that once anchored humanitarian work in the world’s poorest countries are contracting. In that vacuum, Perkins and Obrecht—technology founders whose company did not even exist twenty years ago—havestepped in with a commitment that dwarfs what many governments are now willing to allocate.

Whether that is a source of optimism or a troubling commentary on the retreat of state responsibility from the global poor is perhaps both at once.

What is not in question is the human reality of what is happening in southern Malawi.

A woman who spent decades farming a plot of land too small and too dry to reliably feed her family now has money—her own money, to spend as she determines.

She might buy corrugated iron for a roof that leaks through every rainy season. She might pay school fees for the child who has been staying home.

She might buy a bag of fertilizer or a mobile-money float to start selling small goods to her neighbors.

She decides.

That is the point.

And it is a point that Melanie Perkins — who once sat across from over a hundred investors and was told no, again and again, before anyone believed in her vision — understands in a way that perhaps few other billionaires on earth quite do.

Sometimes, the most transformative thing you can offer someone is not a program or a plan. It is the simple, radical act of trusting them.