How To Fix Poverty: Why Not Just Give People Money?
Dancan Odero at his family's compound. He has epilepsy, which makes it hard for him to work. His family says he's constantly trying to prove he can be useful.
Dancan Odero, a 30-year-old single guy, is a resident of a village in Kenya where every adult is getting $22 a month, every month, for the next 12 years. It’s part of a grand experiment by the American charity GiveDirectly to fight poverty.
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Odero lives just a 10-minute walk away from his cousin's house along a red dirt path. When I catch up with him he's also hacking at branches. The field belongs to his elderly aunt. He's clearing underbrush while he chats with her.
Odero with his mother, Pamela. With no income of his own, he's had to rely on her and other relatives.
She looks worried. Odero has epilepsy. Working in this sun is risky. "I'm scared he could have a seizure right here," she confides in a low voice. She's seen it happen before, she adds. "Many times." But Odero insisted on helping.
His family says he's constantly trying to prove he can be useful — be independent. But people hesitate to hire him for even odd jobs. He'll go out with the other young guys to look for work. Then watch as everyone gets picked but him. Back at his house he says that when that happens, "it makes me so frustrated I start shaking and I feel like crying. But I just keep it inside."
What makes it all worse, he adds, is that he didn't used to be this way. Back in elementary school he was a top student. One of his cousins, Isaac Oguti, remembers how Odero even used to get a little cheeky with teachers, bombarding them with questions. But Oguti says they'd let it slide because "he was so bright, the teachers loved him."
Then, when Odero was in the eighth grade, the seizures started. By the end of the year he had to drop out. He's clearly still intelligent. He loves to read. And he speaks English at a remarkably high level for someone who had to stop studying in middle school. But his family says over the years the attacks seem to have taken a toll on his brain. His speech has become slow and halting. And he often falls into a sort of fog, becoming confused about what's going on around him.
With no real income, he's had to rely on his mother and siblings to pay for practically everything, including food and medicine. His oldest sister Betty says he so hates having to keep asking for money that there were times he wouldn't even tell them he was out of epilepsy drugs. They would just notice that his seizures were becoming more frequent. "Then we'd realize, 'Argh! he's got no medicine.' "
But these days, Odero says, he can use the new GiveDirectly money to buy his meds. He takes them out, handling them very carefully. They eat up a third of his monthly payment.
Still, he's had enough cash left over to save up for something just as precious to him: a sofa and two armchairs. He explains that in the village, when a guy reaches adulthood, it's traditional for him to build himself a house on his parents' land — a mud hut with a living area and sleeping nook. But Odero never had the money. It wasn't until a year ago that his brothers built a hut for him. Even then he had no furniture. Buying that sofa set was so important he says, "so that when guests came to visit I wouldn't be ashamed."
Dancan’s hut.
There was a hitch, though: It turned out the set only consisted of the wood frame. Cushions for the seat and backrest must be purchased separately, and there wasn't enough money to cover that. So since then, Odero has been carefully husbanding his GiveDirectly payouts to complete the set, buying one or two cushions each month.
Dancan’s pride and joy: His new sofa set.
As for any planning beyond that? There's not much, he admits. Odero has no scheme for how to use the charity income to make more money. No strategy for the day the money will stop coming.
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Images: Nichole Sobecki for NPR
