Documentary follows the ambiguous impact of an American non-profit’s grand largesse to a Kenyan village
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.
