Yonas Fote smiles as he proudly shows off his cinema. In an earth-floored room with low wooden benches, he uses a television and sound system to show pirated Nigerian movies dubbed into the local language to his friends. He charges them the equivalent of 12 cents each.<\/p>\n
It might sound like a teenage side hustle, but 19-year-old Fote\u2019s makeshift movie theater in the bustling village of Kamala in southern Malawi is part of an experiment designed to showcase what the future of aid might look like: Give people cash and see what they do with it.<\/p>\n
Fote is among the beneficiaries of what calls itself the world\u2019s biggest unconditional large, direct cash transfer trial, a $198 million program run by the not-for-profit GiveDirectly. As many as 230,000 adults in two districts of Malawi are each receiving about 1.2 million kwacha, or almost $700, and they can do whatever they want with it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Yonas Fote smiles as he proudly shows off his cinema. In an earth-floored room with low wooden benches,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":830676,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98855,28,101,9509,154073],"class_list":["post-830675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-aid","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-global-economy","tag-malawi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/830675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=830675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/830675\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/830676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=830675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=830675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=830675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}