I came up with the idea of Eight, a small basic income pilot in Uganda, via my work as a filmmaker in the developing world. I had often wondered how it is possible to have so many NGOs with so many Jeeps, expensive equipment and well-paid staff, when the villages they’re working in are so poor that the entire population could be fed for weeks on these outlays. It was this that led me to the idea of giving everyone in a particular area a basic income.

I was also passionate about levels of inequality, with a few powerful people routinely able take a lot from the natural world, like oil and other resources, that should belong to everyone and be naturally shared. We live in a world in which we could easily afford to give a basic income to everyone. It makes no sense to me that some people can buy ten helicopters, while others are dying because of a lack of food. A basic income would contribute to a more equal world – it is not left or right, it is not socialist or communist, it’s a new vision. Because it’s saying ‘look, you get money and you can do with it whatever you want’, basic income is right/liberal in some ways, but it’s also left because it is about creating greater equality of chances and outcomes, a more equal world.

What is Eight?

The idea behind Eight, a not-for-profit organisation which we started in late 2015, is to give everyone in a small village a monthly basic income, enough to live a basic life on. The pilot began in January 2017 and is to last two years. We chose to run the pilot in rural Uganda because I have spent a lot of time in Uganda, my wife is Ugandan, and it is affordable. Doing a pilot of this type in the west would simply be unaffordable for a small crowd-funded charity.