Interview: ‘Village One’ documentary follows village with basic income

Interview: ‘Village One’ documentary follows village with basic income

People often ask whether a country has to reach a certain stage of development before a basic income can become viable. A new documentary series will help answer that question.
 
Village One is a new series that follows a village in Uganda, Busibi, where each villager is receiving an unconditional basic income of around $18.25 USD per month for adults and $9.13 USD for children. There are 56 adults and 88 children who are receiving the basic income in the village for at least two years. 
 
Steven Janssens, the director of Village One and the founder of Eight, discussed this project with the UBI Podcast. The series can be viewed now and will have a new episode premier each Saturday.
 
Eight is partnering with Ghent University to conduct research on the effects of the basic income on the village. The project has only been running since January, and Janssens said he already has seen dramatic results.
 
“Every child is going to school in that village now, whereas before it was around 50 percent,” he said.
 
The positive results on education were not just for children. One 18 year old was able to go back to school after he started receiving the basic income, Janssens said.
 
So far, Janssens said they have seen an improvement in health care access, increased entrepreneurship, and democratic organization, even though it has only been around three months since the basic income was started.
 
According to Janssens, villagers have created “saving circles” where they pool together their funds so that they can invest in larger expenditures, even for the benefit of the entire village.
 
“They are more social with each other. They talk more, they get involved more. They also make plans to make the water distribution better, to make the roads better,” Janssens said. “They are really talking a lot with each other to make improvements for the whole village, not only the individual.”
 
As for negative effects, Janssens said he has not yet seen anyone change their behavior for the worse because of the basic income, including harming the environment or spending it on “temptation goods,” such as alcohol.
 
“People who were already boozing before, continue to (do so), but they don’t (consume) booze more or less. People don’t start boozing or using alcohol. There is no change in that type of consumption,” he said.
 
GiveDirectly, which is also running a basic income program in Africa, has run into some issues with individuals skeptical of the organization refusing the basic income. Janssens said they have also had some similar instances in their case.
 
“There is one family that refused our project because they believe that we are going to take over the land, or they don’t believe the money is really for free,” Janssens said.
 
For Janssens, he said he hopes that his project can help people see the effects of basic income for themselves.
 
“We see a lot of inequality and it is so unfair. In all of my travels I see the same. You see so many people with so much potential, so many talents and they are actually in a lot of cases just wasted. A basic income is one of the instruments that can improve it,” Janssens said.

UGANDA/BELGIUM: Eight releases first part of documentary on basic income pilot

UGANDA/BELGIUM: Eight releases first part of documentary on basic income pilot

Eight are a Belgian charity running a basic income pilot in Uganda, previously covered in detail in Basic Income News. A web documentary following the two-year trial will be released in episodes, with the first two episodes now available on the organisation’s website.

The first episode introduces the village of Busibi, called “Village One” in the documentary. Further episodes will cover the launch of the basic income pilot and its effects. New episodes will be released each week for a total of 12 weeks. Following this web documentary, a longer film with different and more layered storylines will be released in late 2018 or early 2019.

While the long-term impacts of the basic income are yet to be seen, Eight report that they have already seen many positive effects, including increased school attendance, improved health, development of local business and increased democratic self-support within the village.

https://vimeo.com/212272708

Reviewed by Kate McFarland

Image and video used courtesy of Steven Janssens

Read more:

Kate McFarland, “UGANDA: Two-year basic income pilot set to launch in 2017”, November 20, 2016, Basic Income News

Kate McFarland, “UGANDA: New Two-Year Basic Income Pilot Project”, April 20, 2016, Basic Income News

UGANDA: Two-year basic income pilot set to launch in 2017

UGANDA: Two-year basic income pilot set to launch in 2017

Eight, a charitable organization based in Belgium, is preparing to run a basic income pilot in Uganda (as previously announced in Basic Income News). The two-year pilot is set to launch in January 2017, and will form the basis for a documentary.

27Documentary filmmaker Steven Janssens and sociologist Maarten Goethals founded the charity Eight in 2015, with the vision of reducing global inequality and allowing all people the opportunity to flourish. Eight euros per week is the amount needed to provide a basic income for one adult and two children in impoverished areas, such as parts of Uganda.

According to Janssens, the founders were inspired partially by their own experiences in work and travel, and partially by research and writing on basic income — including the writings of Philippe Van Parijs, Sarath Davala and Guy Standing’s book on the Indian basic income pilots (Basic Income: A Transformative Policy for India), Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists, Eldar Shafir and Sendhil Mullainathan’s Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, and the results of other basic income pilots, such as those in Dauphin and Namibia.  

 

Two-Year Pilot of Village-Wide Basic Income

As a first step towards its vision, Eight is preparing to launch a pilot study in the Fort Portal region of Uganda in January 2017. The two-year pilot will involve the distribution of unconditional cash transfers to all residents of an undisclosed village of 50 households.

Eight officially registered the village for the pilot in July, and marked this accomplishment by publishing video footage (a “moodclip”) from the location:

https://vimeo.com/181199016

 

 

The amount of the basic income has been fixed at approximately 30 percent of the average income of lower-income families in Uganda (read more about the decision here), amounting to 18.25 USD per month for adults and 9.13 USD for children (small changes to adjust for inflation are possible before the pilot is launched in January). Eight is cooperating with a local bank and local telecom operator to arrange for the disbursement of payments using mobile phones.

05The organization will be primarily investigating the impact of the basic income along four dimensions: education participation of girls and women, access to health care, engagement in democratic institutions, and local economic development.

Anthropologists from the University of Ghent, Belgium, are helping to develop and conduct a study of the effect of the basic income, and are presently collecting data on the state of the village prior to the initiation of the pilot. They will compare these initial data with data collected during and after the basic income intervention.

Janssens emphasizes that the study is truly a pilot — intended to inform more and larger basic income trials: “Important to mention is that it is really a pilot project. From our experiences with this pilot we will learn and adjust where necessary, because in the long term we want to scale-up to more villages as our organization grows.” He adds that, after two years, “the priority of Eight will lay in the possibilities to scale up in a good way.”

 

Village One: The Documentary

Eight does not only plan to publish the results of the pilot study in journals. In addition, it will create a cinematic documentary, Village One, which will trace the story of the introduction of the basic income and its effects on the community over the course of the study.

Currently, Village One is anticipated to be released in October 2018. Janssens — who describes the documentary as “like a siamese twin” to the pilot — plans to disseminate it through television, the Internet, and film festivals.

https://vimeo.com/136620874

 

Musician and actor Jenne Decleir has already begun composing the soundtrack to Village One. In a short video, Decleir encourages others to join the cause and donate eight euros a week (“the cost of three servings of french fries, without any sauce”):

https://vimeo.com/170170494


Eight has received a sufficient amount in contributions to fund the entire first year of the pilot and two-thirds of the second. At present, Eight is still collecting donations for the remainder of the second year and the documentary.

06

Visit eight.world and follow Eight on Facebook and Twitter for more information.  


Thanks to Steven Janssens for input on this article and Genevieve Shanahan for review.

Images & videos used courtesy of Steven Janssens.