Caring Cash

‘Across the world, welfare systems are being remade in the image of ‘basic income’. Tom Neumark powerfully intervenes in this debate by showing how Nairobi’s grant recipients experience care and violence, freedom and bureaucracy. It has implications far beyond Kenya’

‘Approaches a key laboratory of 21st century African experimentality, unconditional cash transfers, from the recipients’ end, attending to relations of care and, notably, care for relations, among Nairobi’s urban poor. Instead of simply critiquing the obvious limitations of such programmes, Caring Cash explores their ‘poetics of care’ and fragile ‘ethics of solidarity’, against the backdrop of a violently strained social fabric’

‘Grapples with a contentious intervention in international development – cash grant programmes – in a caring yet critical way, rehabilitating this often-critiqued approach to poverty alleviation while unpacking its relative limited sustainability. A must read’

‘A great introduction to the cash grant literature for students and practitioners, so much of it being programmatic and policy oriented, and removed from describing the work that cash grants actually do’

Tom Neumark is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Development and the Environment and the Institute of Health and Society, at the University of Oslo. He was awarded his PhD in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge.