snaswa

) What is the minimum amount of cash that a household/individual can receive as Basic Income in the pilot study?

2) The pilot is planned for a period of 10 - 15 years....if in case, unfortunately someone enrolled in the study passed away in the study period, what happens to their money?

3) Where households fight over money coming in as Basic Income, like in a scenario where the wife feels she has been working so hard to win the bread for the family, where the husband has never been able to provide for the family, and so the wife feels she should control the family finances, but the husband feels that as (traditional) head of house he should be in charge, what kind of direction can GiveDirectly provide on this?

4) My village is poor and I know that people shouldn’t put it individual requests, but I feel this is a great opportunity to shed light on the poverty issues in my own home village of Namawanga in Western Kenya. People struggle and always have as far back as I remember. A lot of them with no dignity of life as a direct result of extreme poverty. A Basic Income would definitely greatly contribute to the overall improved quality of life, plus QALYs. Among biggest challenges at home for the poor village of about 3,000 hardworking people is lack a proper access to safe, clean, drinking water and income poverty. If you’re interested in a more detailed account of the poverty issues of my village please let me know so I can email it to a team member at GiveDirectly. It basically a summary of the priority needs and a crude situational analysis of the respective poverty issues.

Hey Paul thanks for the response....I know of a great international charity programme,Possibilities Africa, that is involved in Micro finance and Micro-credit lending in communities back home and elsewhere in Africa. Here,community members get to borrow small loans as capital to start Income Generating Activities and some get to have Productive Assets. I've had a chance to listen to Dean Karlan's (Yale Economics) argument on how the negatives of Microcredits often outweigh the positives in terms of any guaranteed average increase in household income or average increase in consumption...Thinking about it now,and with accurate and reliable feedback from people involved in this programme at home,the biggest challenge to success in Microcredit for poor communities is lack sustainability where,say,a poor household or group of individuals may not always have the security to secure sustainable small loans or have the capacity to maintain a productive asset.Would groups or households or people like these qualify for Basic Income,too as a stimulus to the Microcredits effort?

I think that the biggest potential threat to transparency for this kind pf programme would be middleman issues where people,as you say,may try to manipulate funds and deprive those most in need of what they deserve,by say,deducting an amount of cash before finally sending this to the actual recipient.GiveDirectly,has,I think done an afficient job of making sure that cash is directly delivered to the actual recipients themselves without the need for middleman handling the cash,so the question of exploitation is almost not an issue,unless of course clever con men device shrewd ways of being able to swindle funds,which would be very highly unlikely.

This is how it is back home in my village of Namawanga,Bungoma County,Western Kenya....generally, in spite of people being poor and needy and in my village,we have some form of access to mobile phones and we do have an MPesa point right at the market where people can easily get their mobile cash transfers and stuff done. Recently, my brother who lives in Nairobi lobbied very hard on Twitter to have a Safaricom GPS booster installed at home in the village and the good news is that someone heard him out and Safaricom actually did send an engineer to the village and the booster installed.This is such a huge help for the entire community, saved from over 10 years of poor network coverage.