Money for nothing: ‘Listen carefully and pay attention’
Daniel Nelson
Why help farmers with seeds, or build wells, or encourage women to join co-ops? If you want to help the poor in Africa, Asia and Latin America, give them cash.
The documentary Free Money puts this idea under the spotlight, looking at a Kenyan village where the US NGO GiveDirectly is currently experimenting with handouts.
It opens with a team of motorbike riders wearing GD T-shirts snaking their way to Kogutu, and a woman in chunky heels telling assembled villagers, “Now listen carefully and pay attention.”
So far, so top down.
“I know you’ve had lots of visitors…”, she continues. “... and when these organisations come, they all promise different things. Didn’t one provide seeds? Another one was giving bicycles to kids.”
The introductory talks is interwoven with footage of ardent young Americans listening to an explanation of GD’s rejection of traditional aid thinking, ending with the appealing challenge: “Why don’t we just give money directly?”
The plan is to give everyone over 18 a monthly handout of $22: “This is not a loan.”
The villagers are divided, with the sceptics warning that nothing comes without a price, that you’ll have to kill your first born, that the money is from the Illuminati..
Once the villasgers are won over, the practicalities start: such as how to ensure only genuine residents benefit, and not freeloaders who might travel from Nairobi on the night of the census that’s taken to record who the residents are on Day 1 of the project.
It’s fascinating to hear the discussions, to put a face to “beneficiaries”; to see the impact on a young woman who alone in her family is not accepted on the scheme - for reasons locked in a computer in the US; to hear a Church leader tell his congregation it is wrong to think that accepting money from abroad is wrong - “That’s backward thinking” - and adding “Bring a little to the Church”; to listen to women pointing out that they are included - and to a man warning another, “You know, some women will leave us.”
Another warns even more graphically that if the experiment begins, women will grow horns.
As it gets underway, Kenyan BBC journalist Larry Madowo begins interviewing and giving his opinions, which are influenced by his previous experience of “White saviours”.
His final assessment is that universal basic income is a good thing, but it’s not a magic bullet that will cure poverty.
The experiment, he says, is run by people on the other side of the world who think they know it all and can come to the developing world with a solution.
That is potentially dangerous “and if people do get harmed, if people do get their lives wrecked, there’s nowhere they can go, there’s no authority that they can report to and there’s no action that will be taken against GiveDirectly.”
The experiment is scheduled to continue until 2031, and the film’s weakness is that, firstly, after the fascinating details of the scheme’s establishment it gives only quick snapshots of its ensuing first years and, secondly, there are years to go before an overall judgement can be made
In any case, no 80-minute documentary can give a rounded view of the gains and losses recorded in a society over more than a decade. That’s a task for academics.
But the film does offer an absorbing if piecemeal picture of a fascinating attempt to try out a policy that has been a much discussed subject of debate on the edge of the development aid movement.
And it gives rare glimpses into the thinking and lives of the handful of Kogutu residents on whom the film focuses.