NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Thursday, November 1, 2018

By Nicolas Delaunay

Until recently, Molly struggled to imagine life beyond the end of each repetitive day: work in someone else’s fields and earn enough to eat, rinse, repeat.

“It was a vicious circle I could not escape,” says the 25-year-old villager in the Bondo region of western Kenya.

Her hardscrabble, rural existence is the same for many in Siaya County where people eke out a living farming maize, millet and cotton in the ochre soil.

But that was before the introduction in her village of a cash handout known as “universal basic income“. It’s part of a large, intensive, multi-year study aimed at discovering a new way to end poverty in Africa.

Molly began receiving a no-strings, fixed monthly donation of 2,250 shillings ($22, 19 euros) two years ago, and since then “everything has changed”, she says.

Photo courtesy of Cecilia Schubert.