Free Money

Free Money. Who doesn’t want it? The tricky part is finding someone who is willing to give it away. Fortunately, a non-profit organisation called GiveDirectly decided to do so. The company probably has reams of paper to back its action. But it is a simple idea, really: rather than the roundabout manner NGOs undertake to enable economic prosperity, why not be direct? Why not put the cash in the hands of the people who need it? Cut out the middleman and have each adult handle their own lives. Pretty simple.

But as Lauren DeFilippo and Sam Soko’s documentary shows, the idea may be simple but the troubles start from the very idea of receiving free money. As with all projects concerned with African poverty, Free Money will find its place across Western festivals and platforms seeking to either understand the nature of African poverty or feel good about the West’s relatively elevated position in global economics.

As said, the problems GiveDirectly encounters begin with the idea. In the areas targeted, questions arise from potential beneficiaries: Why should they accept the money? At a meeting to discuss the coming windfall, someone says he has heard that you have to give your firstborn as a sacrifice when you receive the money. Someone else says the money is probably from the Illuminati. There’s enough weirdness around the concept of free money that one of the more reasonable queries is a simple one: what do the beneficiaries have to do to get this free money?

The explanation given concerns Google and Facebook making money whenever you go on their websites and then deciding to give some of it back. But the advertising revenue model hardly makes sense to this audience. And there are other worries. A group of men contemplates what will happen when their wives receive this free money. Their wives may leave them, says one. It is a remark that for a different kind of filmmaker might lead to a film on the relationship between economic independence and marriage, but this isn’t that documentary. Soko and DeFilipo have their minds and cameras elsewhere. But they do show us a pastor urging his community to receive the money. Manna from God, he says, will smack them on the mouth if they don’t open their mouths when God opens the heavens. Receive this money, he says, and remember to bring ten percent to the church.

The story told by the pair of directors settles on the effect of the funds in Kogutu, a village in East Africa. It also gives an account of where GiveDirectly comes from. As you can imagine without surprise, it came from a bunch of Harvard students looking to do good. That school inspires its fair share of megalomaniacs who have already made it made by getting into the institution and so must now carve out a way of making big bucks and/or making headlines. For the skinny white guy Michael Faye and his mates, GiveDirectly was their own way out of the school and into the headlines. Although Faye doesn’t get a hefty amount of screen time, he becomes the documentary’s hero. In one interview, he objects to a description of his company’s mission as an experiment. The person conducting this interview, Larry Madowo, becomes the film’s de facto villain.

Madowo, who has worked stints at both CNN and the BBC, bastions of dominant Western media, takes it as his duty to query GiveDirectly, addressing himself indirectly to the filmmakers and directly to Faye. At one point, Faye is stumped by one of his questions, which proceeds from the one regarding GiveDirectly’s “experiment”. He asks if, like Google, GiveDirectly is running A/B tests on people. Clearly, Madowo takes his position as the African querying the West from inside the West seriously. He knows his country enough to worry, he says. And he wants to know what might happen after the 12 years that GiveDirectly intends to give free money ends.

None of what Madowo asks are ridiculous questions, but the tone he adopts seems misplaced. Are there any alternatives? African countries have been rich enough to embark on poverty alleviating programmes for years and yet nothing has changed. Is the person who is now able to send her kids to school, courtesy of GiveDirectly, looking at the colour of her saviour? That seems unlikely; it’s a perspective only available to the overfed intellectual. But Madowo’s distance enables his righteousness. Watching him getting stationed as the film’s contrarian voice, one wonders if his inclusion in the project was merely so Free Money doesn’t become an ad for GiveDirectly. That’s understandable, but it leads to another question: DeFilippo and Soko are from different parts of the world. Does their film’s refusal to judge indicate their view of the white saviour? Maybe they’ll be more forthcoming about their own politics when they return to Kogutu for a sequel.