A different approach to aid: Providing a subsistence income

It’s a very different way of providing development dollars to Africa. What it is not: funneling the money to the government, or setting up a field office filled with aid workers, or dictating the specific terms of the project, or setting up a project designed to run only a few years and then disappear.

What it is: providing a subsistence income to every man, woman and child in a Namibian village. There is no poverty test. No strings attached. No terms. No complex project that must be accomplished with the money.

The results are much different than what you might expect. The villagers do not squander the money on alcohol. Instead, they buy food and clothing for their children. They repair their houses. They go to the doctor. They pay school tuition. And if there is any left over, they start small businesses. Soon they are generating their own income.

The results are immediate and measurable. School enrollment is up 92 percent. Malnourishment in children has declined from 42 to 10 percent. AIDS patients are responding better to treatment. With a modest tax hike on the wealthy, the program could be extended to the entire country. But will it? The pervasive attitude is still that the worst thing you can do to help the poor is give them money, despite the successes shown here and by such microlending enterprises as Kiva.

Not so long ago, I heard someone (I’ve forgotten who now) on the radio discussing how, for the costs of the Social Security program, we could provide every citizen of the United States with a $10,000 base annual income. Of course, some people may choose to squander the free money or not to work. But what might many other people do if they knew that their most basic needs could be taken care of?

It sounds like a fantasy. There is no way such a program would ever be established in a country where many people consider access to basic health care to be a luxury rather than a right. But it’s fun to imagine what could be possible, if we only dropped our assumuptions.

• A New Approach to Aid: How a Basic Income Program Saved a Namibian Village (Spiegel Online)
• Basic Income Grant Coalition Namibia
• About guaranteed minimum income and basic income (Wikipedia)
• Kiva.org: Loans That Change Lives
• Basic Income Earth Network