Han Sheng Chia

Han Sheng Chia is Vice President of Innovation at GiveDirectly. He leads the organization’s investments to achieve step function change in digital payments across both the U.S. and emerging markets. In his role, he advises governments, Fortune 500 corporations and private philanthropies on how to drive digital transformation in public services delivery. He started the organization’s humanitarian crises practice that has distributed more than $150M to individuals affected by emergencies around the world. In 2020, together with government leaders and academics, he helped bring to market a government led, A.I. driven approach to deliver emergency aid. The approach contactlessly identified, enrolled, and delivered cash aid to more than 140,000 extremely poor individuals within days of a crisis. This work has been featured in WIRED, Reuters, BBC and has received awards from the Paris Peace Forum and the UNESCO Netexplo Forum.

Han Sheng’s work involves close partnerships with telecommunications companies and global payment gateway providers. He works closely with financial and telecommunications regulators to enable mass scale payments and to design systems that leverage the latest in A.I. while upholding principles of public interest such as data privacy, ethics and algorithmic fairness. He was previously a strategy and economic consultant at Keystone, and regularly lectures on digital transformation in public sector delivery at Brown and Columbia University’s public policy programs.