The gift of free money: on the indeterminacy of unconditional cash transfers in western Kenya

Abstract

In the area surrounding the western Kenyan market town of Kaleko, almost half of the households targeted by the NGO GiveDirectly refused to participate in an unconditional cash transfer programme. Based on interviews and repeated visits to Kaleko over the last ten years, the article illuminates the reasons for the high refusal rate. Instead of understanding it as a technical problem to be fixed, the article situates it in local understandings of the economy as relational. Observing that different actors understood the transfer differently (e.g. as embedded in market exchanges with occult actors, asymmetrical gift relations, or political redistribution schemes), the article concludes that it was difficult for GiveDirectly to control how its cash transfer programme was interpreted locally because it did not accept the paradoxical nature of ‘the gift of free money’. If actors oppose money conceptually to the free gift, interpretations of unconditional cash are bound to be multiple and the transfer will remain indeterminable.