UBI Piloters Network
Newsletter 11- June '24
How 112 families in a tribal village in India used an unconditional lump sum
Project DEEP disbursed INR 65,000 (USD 780) each to 112 households in three hamlets of Sada village (Amliphala, Mana Mangri & Kadaiya Mangri) in the Dungarpur district of South Rajasthan (India), in December 2023. This was done through the bank account of women.
A survey conducted in March 2024 reveals that 70% of the funds were utilised to create and preserve intergenerational assets including houses, agricultural land, release of debt collateral and setting up of non-agriculture enterprises. To read the whole report click here.
And to hear from the community and founders, click here.
Emergency Basic Income During COVID19? Policy Lessons from Maricá, Brazil
Jurgen De Wispelaere (University of Bath/BIEN), Leticia Morales (Universidad Austral de Chile) and Fabio Waltenberg (Universidade Federal Fluminense) have written a blog post about the role of emergency basic income in the Brazilian municipality of Maricá during COVID-19. They claim the dial-up/dial-down model where an emergency supplement is grafted onto a pre-existing basic income model during the pandemic resulted in a superior policy performance that serves as a lesson for future crisis events. The blog post is based on the article “Basic income as a pandemic social protection instrument: Lessons from Maricá, Brazil”, recently published in a themed issue on “Emergency Basic Income: Opportunity or Distraction?” of the International Social Security Review. (Jurgen De Wispelaere also debate emergency income during the pandemic with Francesca Bastagli and Joe Chrisp in the recent edition of The Politics of UBI seminar series, soon available on YouTube.)
Basic Income for the Arts- what have we learned after 20 months?
On Wednesday, June 5th, the fourth session of discussions on the Irish Basic Income for the Arts Pilot Scheme will take place. Launched in 2022, this program provides 2,000 artists with a weekly universal basic income of €325 for three years.
Click here to find out more and access the link to this discussion and the previous three.
Basic Income for people with existing mental health problems: request for advice
We are a group of researchers at the University of Otago in New Zealand who hope to do a randomised controlled trial of an unconditional income top-up. This would be for people receiving government benefits because they are unable to work due to mental health problems. We are in the very early stages, and so far we have a small grant from the Health Research Council of New Zealand to develop our plans. Although there are many papers and reports showing that basic income and unconditional cash transfers improve mental health we haven’t found any other projects specifically targeted at people with existing mental health problems. If anybody knows of any, could you please let us know at pauline.norris@otago.ac.nz