I am planning to start up a small business selling second-hand clothes for women. I had done this kind of business before the Covid19 Pandemic hit our country, although I had to close it down since most of my potential customers moved to rural areas due to job loss. I have plans of starting all over again as it has high demand due to the purchasing patterns of women in my community. Besides, most of the people in my community prefer purchasing second-hand clothes as it is affordable compared to new ones.

According to my opinion, what Give Directly does so well is that they give out unconditional transfers, different people have different needs, and we have the freedom how to spend the transfers so long as it is something that does not harm us together with community members. The transfers are given in lump sum amounts and this helps in planning purposes in terms of the developments that we would wish to engage in at a personal level. Unlike other projects where it is given in small amounts. 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. 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 transfer, I never had a modern house, I owned a small grass-thatched house which was leaking during the rainy season. I thank Give Directly for the transfers as I managed to build a three-bedroom modern house for kshs 50,000. Initially, I never had peace of mind as it was so tiresome moving some of my valuable items during the rainy season, my young boys too never had adequate space to spend their nights and this was so stressful as they could sleep in a neighbour's house. My peace of mind is finally restored since I built a house. Getting a balanced and regular meal had been the most difficult thing for my young family of three. I used the whole balance of kshs 5000 to stock food for an entire month. We are very grateful for the transfers.

Receiving the transfers meant so much to me. I was at home with my grandchildren doing laundry, I had no money left with me to buy food for my family of six. I had looked everywhere including working in others farms to earn a living just to make end meets but nothing good was forthcoming. I heard a message notification on my phone and had to request my helper whom we were together with to confirm. Upon confirmation, it was transfers from Give Directly, I informed my husband and celebrated it with songs of praises as we had been struggling financially.

The biggest difference in my daily life is that farming is now easy, with the cows, there is no need to hire labour, I am able to cultivate a larger piece of land within the shortest time possible.

I am a mother of teen boys, I had a one bedroom house which could not occupy all of us. My boys had to sleep in the kitchen, which was not comfortable as the chicken seem to be so noisy very early in the morning. I used part of transfers of Kshs 35,000 to build an extra two bedrooms for my boys and visitors. I do subsistence farming for a living, most of the times I do it alone since getting extra money to hire labor has been the greatest challenge, with the transfers, I managed to buy two cows worth Kshs 20,000 to help in cultivating the farm, this takes shortest time possible as it is so fast as compared to doing it manually all by myself.