马拉维700美元现金补助计划成效显著

More now, we're joined by Bloomberg News reporter, in Johannesburg. Nancy, can you explain I mean, there have been different ways to do this. I think about, you know, microloans and and kind of direct lending. But what makes this program different, and and why was it so successful? Successful? Yeah. Well, basically, what makes it different is the size. It has been done before by GiveDirectly, which has been active in a number of countries, including The US.

But in the past, either it's been much smaller trials or just certain people in a community. For example, the poorest people in the community would have got the the money. What they've done here is taken what they call a district level, in fact, two districts, and all eligible adults, which are anyone with an ID book, which is a Malawian ID, is eligible to get the the 700. And almost everybody takes it out, something like 98 to 99%.

And then, yes, you can do whatever you want with it with the idea being that most people will use it to better their lives or start up some sort of economic activity. And how are we seeing the funds be deployed? Are people renovating their houses or buying produce? What's kind of the on the ground reporting that you guys saw? Well, there's all sorts of things. So the main village we went to, Kamala, what we noticed is we met a couple of people.

We met a lot of people. One of them was had set up a a cinema. I mean, it's just a room where he bought a CV and a sound system, and it was showing dubbed Nigerian movies dubbed in which is a local language. Oh, that's great. In Hollywood. We love that. We had a tailor who there was suddenly huge demand because people had money, so they wanted better clothes. So he bought himself an electric sewing machine so he could make better dresses and put up the cost of it.

Somebody else had bought a fridge so they could sell chilled water. It's quite hot there. A lot of people were plastering inside of their houses, which is not always the case. And what does surprise me is that a lot of people putting corrugated iron on their roof. Now corrugated iron sheets in a lot of countries is indicative of poverty, but Malaga, which is really poor, most people have to make do with thatch. And in summer, it rains heavily, so water comes straight through the thatch and destroys the bags of pigeon peas or millets or corn or whatever you might have grown the previous season that you're not relying on.

So it makes a big difference. It's interesting. Most of the cases, it seems like people did try to do something entrepreneurial with it, something that would continue to better their lives in the future. Can you talk to us about was there any research or anything that you learned as you why you think that was? And put us into perspective, $700 there. What does that mean? How much is the average salary per month? How much money is that in local terms?

Well, dealing dealing with that first, it's a lot of money. The capital income in Malawi is something like 670 US a year. So that's about a year's income for a British Malawian. Now we're in rural areas, which are a lot poorer than where the little wealth there is is concentrated, which is in the two big cities of Blanta and Longue. So people really don't have much money. So you can do an awful lot with that. You can you can fix your house to a certain extent.

You can buy, you know, a sewing machine, farming equipment. You can buy livestock. A lot of people did that as well. And from there, you can make money. So for instance, if you set up, you know, a few chickens, you can sell eggs. If you have a cow, you can sell them milk, things like that. How do they actually go through distributing the the cash? Is it all in one lump sum, and who's actually behind the effort? Okay.

So most of the money for this particular program comes from Canva, which is an Australian startup design startup. And the billionaire founders of of Canva really like this program. So they gave a $150,000,000 to it, and they visited it and had some input into its design. The way it's done is people are registered. It's explained how it works, Basically, it's the no strings. You don't have to do anything particularly with the money.

You can make your own mind up. Then your details are taken down. Then you are given the money through a mobile finance app. You know, in Africa, most people get money via mobile finance as opposed to mobile banks. First of all, they send a small token amount. I think it was 80,000 of the 1,200,000. Then they follow-up to make sure you've got it so they've got the right number. There were no mistakes. And then a few weeks later, you get the rest.

Anthony, I think there's a lot of issues right now with some of the major aid groups. So we've got USAID being basically deleted off the map here in The US, but there's a lot of controversy right now about when you give to a charity, what the charity does with that money. It seems to me like this is not only good for the people receiving it, but it's good for the people who are giving it when they can see the direct use of their dollars.

Do you expect given the it's new, but the nominal success of this program that you will see more programs like this going forward? Yeah. I think it is would be really liked by donors. The reason being is 83% of what they give goes directly to recipients. Now that's very high for a for an aid organization because normally, say, you were conducting some sort of program, you know, basically building irrigation facilities or something like that, you'd have to pay for labor, transport, equipments, people flying out, experts.

It all adds up. Whereas here, there's minimal staff, trans by mobile money, so pretty cheap, And there's not much beyond that that needs to be done to administer the program. Just a little bit of research to follow-up and see what happens to the money. So if successful and, you know, on the face of it, it was pretty successful from what I saw. It could definitely be replicated, and that's what Go Directly and Canva really want people to see and hope to see it replicated in other countries or other parts of Malawi even.