I am a carpenter by profession. I am planning to expand my business of carpentry so as to cater for my young children who are still in Primary school. I will be doing this by taking a loan from the Sacco which I will be paying monthly from the profits collected. In addition, I will be doing subsistence farming to help boost my stock of carpentry.

In my opinion, what GiveDirectly does well in this program is that we receive the transfers in lumpsum amounts. This helps in planning as one is in a position to do something huge as compared to when the transfers are given in small instalments. The unlearned recipients are taught how to use mpesa. This has reduced the number of theft cases in the community as most of us managed to change our pins to a more secure code. To avoid household conflict, what needs to be done differently is enrolling all the individuals in the household. During enrollment, those individuals who did not have responsibilities by then were left out of the program yet these are the same people who steal from their old and vulnerable parents. Give Directly staff are very transparent during the enrollment process, they are so keen during the verification process and this ensures that none is left out during registration to the program. Another thing that needs to be done differently is enrolling all the communities in a specific village for uniformity purposes and this will prevent too many complaints coming from the communities that are left out during the registration to the programs.

Before the transfers, I never had cows before as I had no stable source of income. I used the transfers to buy female cows for kshs 35,000. This is for milk production for my family's consumption and sale. I do casual work to earn a living and most of the time the pay is too little to cater for my basic needs, I do top it up with the money from selling milk and this has enabled me to take care of other basic needs like food, clothing and kids school fees. I used the remaining part of the transfers of kshs 20,000 to buy a piece of three-seater furniture. I used to fear hosting friends and relatives as I never had enough seats for them, but my self-esteem has improved since I started receiving transfers from GiveDirectly.

It was in the evening and I was busy with the carpentry work at my workplace when suddenly I heard my phone ringing notifying me of a new message. I stopped to check it and wow! I could believe my eyes when I saw that I had received KES 55000 from GiveDirectly. I was so happy on seeing this but I could not let out my feelings be known to those around me. I left the work I was doing and I went silently to a mobile money agent shop that I trusted to withdraw the money and pick it up later. On my way back to the workshop, I called my wife and informed her about the good news. She was so happy on hearing this and we thanked God for it, because it was going to help us fulfill our dreams.

The transfer has brought a big difference in our daily lives as a family. I am no longer stressed about some debts such as paying my wife's dowry and hence I have rested from going to work each day. I only go occasionally since the money that I get paid is enough to cater for two or three days now that the budget has been reduced. As a result of this, I have had time to do other household chores such as looking after my cows as they graze.

I had for a long time been stressed by the idea of not having paid my wife's dowry. I had tried my best to save up the little that I get paid at the workshop but all was in vain since most of the money usually goes to the purchase of food and essential household items for my family. So when GiveDirectly came up with this program of helping the less fortunate in the society, I saw the opportunity to finally fulfill my wish of paying off the dowry. I thus gave out KES 30000 with a promise to finish the remaining amount. With the remaining transfer amount, we decided to spend it on buying twenty iron sheets at KES 17000 and ten trees for the construction of another house. We only had one small grass-thatched house and we have been meaning too for a while to construct another one but we didn't have the money needed to do so. We are thus grateful to GiveDirectly because of their big support to us.