From each, nothing according to ability; to each, a pretty decent amount regardless of need. This is the experiment in radical giving being carried out by the US non-profit organisation GiveDirectly and its perma-smiley co-founder Michael Faye. The group donates free money directly as universal basic income to villages and needy communities all over the world, without the costly admin of means testing. East Africa is the main focus, and this documentary tracks the group’s association with the Kenyan village of Kogutu, making monthly cash transfers beginning in 2017 to properly constituted adult residents there over a projected period of 12 years.
It sounds like the premise of a quirky British comedy like Local Hero or Whisky Galore!, only with money instead of whisky. The lucky lottery winners of Kogutu are delighted, of course, and no one in this film appears to be frittering the money away on booze or drugs, many are using it for home improvements and to help their families. Universal Basic Income is an idea whose time has, arguably, come. Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang in the US argues for it; in the UK and elsewhere, the Covid lockdown effectively showed that governments could do this, or something like it, in the form of furlough payments. And after all, state provision of facilities such as roads and bridges, used by rich and poor alike, shows that the principle is already there.
But this film also shows the drawbacks. There is a hint of white-saviourism in GiveDirectly’s work; a sense that Africans, longtime western charity consumers, are expected to be passively grateful and if there is a problem or disorder of some kind, then GiveDirectly can simply wash their hands of the whole thing in their distant offices and start again somewhere new. And there is no universality in this Universal Basic Income; it creates a disenfranchised class among those just beyond the village boundary, people suffering resentment and depression having missed out on the bonanza due to an accident of geography.
GiveDirectly could be playing God and creating a two-tier society: and yet they can argue that something bold needs to be done to lift people out of poverty. Perhaps this brief documentary does not fully investigate the implications, but it is an intriguing case study.
• Free Money is released on 21 April in UK and Irish cinemas and on digital platforms.
