Ruth Alexander
speaker
4,250 appearances
120 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2011
last heard Aug 2018
Ruth Alexander’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service.
I'm Ruth Alexander.
A few years ago, a group of postgraduate students at MIT in the United States were chatting about what might be the best way to give aid in Africa.
With so many well-meaning charities from the US and Europe arriving with their various ideas of how to help people out of poverty, how do you choose which is the best way?
What if, they reasoned, instead of presuming aid workers know best, why not just give cash to the extreme poor and allow them to make their own decisions about how to spend it?
This is Paul Niehaus.
He and his fellow students set up a charity called Give Directly, where they arranged to give up to $1,000 to poor families in rural Kenya.
This wasn't the first time that organisations had given cash direct to poor people, but in previous programmes, usually there were strings attached.
But for Paul and his colleagues, their condition was that there were no conditions.
Spend it how you like.
They used a mobile phone banking service to pay out the money.
They chose a group of villages in the far west of Kenya.
Many of the people living here grow crops and look after animals.
There are clusters of grass-thatched and tin-roofed houses surrounded by fields where cows and goats graze.
We sent a producer based in Kenya to record the experiences of some of the people who received money from the charity.
Moses Lagunya was one of those who got the money, about £130, which is a lot of cash in rural Kenya.
It enabled him to pay a dowry to get married and to look after his two children.
Another beneficiary was Michael Medego.
His elder son is studying carpentry at a technical college, but when the researchers gave him $1,000, he was able to use some of that to pay the college fees.
Michael, like many of the villagers given money by the researchers, spent a substantial amount on his home.
Showing 1521–1540 of 4,250 · page 77 of 213
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