Togo Showed The World A Better Way To Do Stimulus

When lockdowns deprived millions of their livelihoods, even the poorest countries found new ways to send their people cash. Could this presage a new relationship between government and citizens?

- Ted Alcorn

Atani Bamaze was working his small plot of land, scything weeds down to the rust-colored soil, when he received a lifeline in the form of a text message.

It was late 2020, and though Bamaze still didn’t know anyone sickened by Covid-19, the pandemic had disrupted his life all the same. The village in Togo where he lives with his wife and infant daughter relied on trade and travelers from nearby Benin. When the border closed after the first recorded infection that spring, prices of basic foodstuffs began climbing precipitously. The 31-year-old typically earned money tutoring, but then local schools shuttered, depriving him of his main source of income. To make matters worse, the seeds he’d sown had baked in the sun instead of taking root, because there’s been too little rainfall.

Now, reading from his handset, he learned the Togolese government would be sending him a cash stipend for the next five months. The first payment from the program, called Novissi, was instantly available via his mobile phone.

The eldest of eight children, Bamaze says his parents expected him to stay in the village and care for them in their old age, but he yearned to break away. Although this windfall wasn’t enough to make that possible, he would use it to pay rent as well as the fees for his wife’s secretarial course, saving the rest to buy maize for the coming year’s planting. “If you don’t have anything and then somebody gives you a little,” he says, “you have to be grateful for the little that you receive.”