#DappCon22: Day 3 - Examples From The Field: Kenya - Community Driven Basic Income

Transcript

yes learning by doing and Lessons Learned good morning don't with the poor if you make a promise you keep it it's a moral contract it was very uncomfortable to ask Billy the question what were the impacts when the money stopped and some of us cried when we watched this video right um I'm a fan of basic income I volunteer for four organizations that work for basic income um I'm on the board of the Dutch basic anchor movement I'm a vice chair of basic Earth Network Mission possible

2030 and I'm the co-founder of Ubi blockchain Collective so yes I am a fan and that's for a reason because basic income is about unconditional love for people that you've never met and it's more than poverty relief um I'm going to talk about the project in Kenya but I want to give you the example of my daughter she's a trait she's she's training to become a nurse when she graduates next year she will graduate with a depth of 40 000 Euros it's a vital profession that's how Society is if she had had a

basic income she would graduate as a nurse without a debt basic income is about Freedom it's about absolute freedom of choice no judgment yeah you just give money to the people and it's no coincidence Billy mentioned so many different effects a variety of effects but we see that everywhere if you go to Kenya to India to Namibia and that is because people have the freedom of choice to spend the money or whatever they want and not everybody wants a goat or a bus ticket or food vouchers it's about restoring freedom no mandatory servitude

when you're on welfare human rights these are seven articles in the uh a universal Declaration of Human Rights it's about Brotherhood and Sisterhood without distinction a right to life liberty and security no slavery or servitude free development of your personality free choice of employment and the standard of living adequate for the health and well-being so we're all responsible to contribute the realization of basic income and basic income leads to self-organized distributed autonomous opportunities

based on human intelligence and I'm fed up I mean for decades we've been advocating for basic income explaining basic income explaining the results of the of the pilots that was always an excuse not to implement it so the organizations that work and say that they are working for to reduce poverty they should really ask themselves do I really want to solve the problem of poverty IMF dozens and dozens and dozens of strategy papers for poverty reduction how much money do these people earn World Bank

dozens and dozens and dozens of papers mapping the poverty offering loans to countries to solve their problems what are they doing sustainable development goals many millions and millions and millions of dollars are spent on plans and papers to reduce to to contribute to the goals focusing on one or two maybe three if you introduce a basic income it contributes to the majority if not all the sustainable development goals one intervention and I feel this sense of urgency because of what they are implementing a system of total surveillance and control

through the money system the Central Bank digital currencies that are coming are really scary and they will people will only be able to buy things that they are authorized to buy and you guys probably and girls probably don't have that problem but the ordinary people that have no idea of what's coming they will be slaves through the money system so it's up to us to decide which future we are going to build and we're going to sit back and wait for that system to be implemented or are we going to collaborate and build a Preferred Future not a possible future not a a a possible

future but the future that we want and we can do that thanks to blockchain technology the biggest challenge is can we reach that last Mile and that last mile up is people without a phone without access to Internet people that want to use their local National currency because that's where they what they can use to buy their goods and services people that are not literate do we want to force them into smartphones I mean smartphones are handy I have one but they're also a track and Trace device they're also a frequency weapon it's also a tool for crowd control and mind control

so I don't want to force people that have no clue about a smartphone to give them a smartphone in order to get money to receive money that they need to survive if they have a basic income and they choose to buy a smartphone great but we're not going to force them into smartphones because that's the only way we can we can think of to get the money there so we really need to get the money to the people before the infrastructure of total surveillance control and menu regulation is in place to make people resilient to what is coming we are the multinationals and we have all the building blocks to get the money to the people directly

and the people themselves will know what to do with it so the only thing we have to do is bring the money to the people let go and enjoy the show so that's our vision we don't have to wait for politicians we don't need more evidence we know it works the only thing we need to do is bring the money to the people and we of course invite you to be part of it so and Billy's not the only one coordinating this project we also have Evans and these are the most important people in this project and when the project started I think it was Billy who

contacted sarath and he said please arrest help me to make big basic income happen in the village so we had a meeting and so I said shall we do it we said okay I'm meeting so very short decision so Billy already explained to you that we started with 10 people you know uh ten dollars a month and these are those first 10 people and you can see you cannot drop a box of smartphones with a wallet installed on it with some cryptocurrencies and think that you have given them a basic income these are the people the more children in the village than adults so in these houses live you know like four or five sometimes six

people then impact Market came along and they said to us we have a lot of money can you help us to access communities we said okay let's try it we have access to many communities but we don't have the money to provide it so let's do a pilot and choose a rural area and let's see if we can reach that last mile uh we need an amount that can actually make a difference so seven dollars a week in a in a place like Kenya can actually be life-changing it has to be something that can be

exchanged into their currency we don't want any data mining we want the community to be in the lead and we want them work together with the community to see if they can reach that last mile so and we said to them if that if this pilot is going to be a success we can provide you with more many many communities yeah we have an urban urban community that sarath will be talking about later today uh ready to receive and we have many many many communities we have a worldwide Network now Kenya is relatively easy because they already have an m-pesa system in place an infrastructure of mobile payments and in every village you have

these m-pesa shops where you can use your features phone and get your physical notes so that infrastructure is already there so from a blockchain perspective the entrance is the amp basa system then you can let go and together with the community they themselves came up with a solution to reach the people without a phone you know it was very creative solution to think of okay if you just buy a SIM card and you just borrow someone else's phone you can claim it then you go to the m-pesa shop get your cash and then you give the phone back only together with the communities we can solve these problems so how did it work impact Market has an

app velora app and they distribute a stable coin uh The Silo dollar which is around well when I calculated it was 759 Kenyan shillings then we had to work with a fintech company in Kenya called contani Bay and they provided the ussd integration so that the money was exchanged to Kenyan shillings in the back end so the people that were actually participating didn't even realize that they were were actually receiving a stable coin and then if they choose to uh to to have a physical cash they could go to an m-pesa shop and they would lose a little bit more so in the end phase they would lose a lot well almost a little bit less

than six percent yeah so from the seven dollars minus six percent they would receive Billy and Evans on a voluntary basis they did the interviews with uh villagers they you know made an overview of how many people were there they did the clan meetings The Village meetings the training they organized support for the elderly and the illiterate to be able to claim they had to cope with their disappointments they had to explain to the surrounding Villages so be patient be patient that was almost full-time job these people are my heroes

what is the situation now we have 358 they call it beneficiaries we prefer to call them participants 358 adults this is a uh their an overview of the last month and as you can see there are only 20 claims in a village you know in the month of August only 20 which is this 140 Euros in total they use a community wallet you know where they uh uh bring the where they transfer the the the stable coins and then every every single person has an individual wallet that is connected to the m-pesa system yeah don't um it's a moral contract

what was the reason that the money stopped it was the bear market so they had a stable coin but they didn't have stable funds because they kept you know their their their funds in uh currencies that were vulnerable to the volatility of the market so yeah if you if you distribute a stable coin it feels stable but if the funds are not stable then it doesn't really matter then it turns out now it turns out that they're also trying to um convince people to use that defy products so they're trying to set up you know uh insurances digital insurances money

lending systems and that might be a good thing but if you realize that the people themselves also can organize decentralized Finance which I call A Wheel of Fortune you know in in many experiments we see what we see happening is that people form a group of people that they know and trust and then from the basic income they give for example if a basic income of 28 dollars a month they decide to give three dollars from that income to one person and then the next months to the other person and that means that every one month there's one person who has a bit more so they can invest in a by a cow or you know a goat or whatever so that is also decentralized Finance

but in the physical form what do we have to do now because you know we are not leaving them um we we made a promise we made a promise that we will stand with them until the last mile is reached for all the adults in the village for starters so we really need funding to fill the Gap that impact Market left so there's around 200 000 Euros in total I think for an income for a year then we need to onboard the remaining adults that's 100 people and then we once really want to reach the children as well we've discussed that with billion Evans they they prefer

that we go to other Villages first before we before we go to the children I think we have to do both at the same time because they have so many children there and um a basic income is unconditional for everyone so it's also uh unconditional regarding age so we need time of skilled people to help us with the Technical Solutions yeah for example if we have a a fund of uh with the cryptos then we need our own ussd integration so it can so we can reach that and base our system so we really need help of technical people who can help us to do that and of course we need money well

if you have a spare a few spare die or you see 20 tokens you can donate today we we tested our groceries safe yesterday so and it works but this is what we should do in the long run in my opinion very simple model let's start with the last mile The Last Mile can only be reached with the community in Kenya it's the amp basis system relatively easy but you can also think of a peer-to-peer exchange shop instead of an m-pesa shop or find other Creative Solutions yeah together with with the communities it's context specific that's the only way we can reach the last mile

we also need a pool of value or a sovereign fund that is stable for not only today but also for the next Generations and there are many ways to uh to fill that fund we just have to be creative you know if you can create a Dao or to to to to to to earn passive money for yourself or your company you can also copy paste that Dao and create another one to fill the fund yeah or you could use you're staking things to do donations Corporate social responsibility um that cannot be that difficult a smart contract is only smart when built by warm-hearted people and we

actually be aiming for wisdom and we really see collaboration with people from the blockchain space to build together and I know you're all busy but um you know this is for Humanity thank you foreign I think we have a quick segue into the Hyderabad work free experiment uh closely followed by a panel um I wonder if the audience has any questions for Hilda the presentation and the findings from the Kenya on-ground

service the lessons learned well it's good then we can move on to salad I'm sure we'll have plenty of opportunity with the panel so we have one question um yeah [Music] I'm curious like how it um how the basic income what effects it has in terms of does it enable local trade more or does it enable people to buy things from the outside or what is the main effects is it like

yeah the effects are numerous but you heard Billy saying I don't know if you were here when Billy was online that the local businesses were booming so even The Villages that did not receive basic income because people for the first time they had money I mean there were people there that never had an income in their whole life you know so uh so yeah local businesses are Community it's a Renaissance uh uh it's you know basic income it's a Renaissance for local for smaller medium businesses and um you know the um it's domestic violence is reduced peace peace on the household level nutrition people

children go to school they can pay the school fees they can go to the doctor um they um one the the best story in the in this Village is that before we had this project local politicians would come to the Village yeah and they would ask people to come to their venue they would have to wait there for three hours and then they would be paid one dollar just for their presence you know for the politicians yeah I'm very popular so many people coming here but they were coming for one for that one dollar when basic income arrives these people said to these politicians I'm not coming for that one though right now seven dollars a week

you bring us policies instead of you know promises and they managed to get this new drinking water facility you know because they had a better position to negotiate with the politicians so these are effects um that are life-changing I mean this project is a success and also a failure so far because the money stopped but these changes are forever yeah so they also organizing a health facility in a neighboring Village so uh on every domain things change but it's context specific in the region it's context specific on the household

level and it's context specific on the individual level and that's why you see an endless list of effects and you see that in Kenya in India in wherever you go and that is because of Freedom the absolute freedom of choice you mentioned that you wanted to reach the children um are you thinking about a specific age and can you tell me why I genuinely don't understand that much because I think adults are probably the best too you know know where to put this money or to send their kids as you said to school

uh yeah why yes our experience is that if you want to reach the children the best way is to do that through the mothers um and uh yeah any age and it can be uh uh as high as you know what you give to adults but it can also be uh half of it that's what usually is done uh my personal opinion is just give them the same amount and then they can say for for later or whatever um no yeah so as soon as you're born you're entitled to a basic income because the only condition you have to meet is Being Human and the life nothing more foreign

's good thank you for your time Hilda very quickly next up next we have