Can you spare an ubu, pal?
SA start-up sets out ambitious plan to combine unused assets, such as leftover food and groceries, with a digital universal basic income currency to alleviate poverty and (one day) change the world
A universal basic income that gives poor people the chance to become economically active without help from government sounds pretty far-fetched, right? Well, the folks over at Project UBU — an SA start-up founded by Bridge Capital director Dudley Baylis — are developing the idea of a universal basic income called the universal basic unit (ubu for short). Project UBU’s initial testing has been funded by the company’s co-founders and a Norwegian angel investor, Globalvoice. Together, they’ve spent US$1.79m over the past 30 months to deliver the minimum viable product (MVP). "Our philosophy is to create a universal basic income that is decentralised and does not rely on taxation," Project UBU CEO Justin McCarthy tells the Financial Mail. It may sound like pie in the sky, but a mathematical model, built by someone with a Cambridge PhD in the subject, sits behind it. So what are ubus? At its core, an ubu is a digital currency that aims to unlock "currently dormant, inefficiently allocate...
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