My new goals is to construct a decent shelter for my family. Currently, I am sleeping in an old, grass-thatched house that leaks a lot during the rainy season. Because of the bad condition of my house, I always pray to God that it does not rain at night since it means spending a sleepless night with my family.

In my opinion, GiveDirectly did well in sending unconditional cash transfers directly to our mobile phones. Through this, we were able to plan at the household level on how best to utilize the aid to transform our lives. I do not see anything that it does not do well.

I spent my transfer to support the education of my 3 children, one in college and two in secondary school. I used KES 15,000 to pay part of the school fees since they had huge fee arrears. In addition, I had two kids who were not going to school since they are dumb and required a special school. They contracted malaria disease 3 days after receiving my aid. I spent KES 15,500 of the transfer in seeking medical care for them. However, they were not able to survive and they passed on because of the disease. I had to spend the remaining amount on their funerals.

It was around noon when I was taking my lunch meal, I heard my phone ringing so loudly. Since I am illiterate I asked one of my sons to confirm who might have sent the messages at that particular time of the day because it was so unusual. on checking, he realized that it was an Mpesa message from GiveDirectly. I couldn't honestly hold my joy because I felt like it was a dream. We started celebrating as a family because we all knew that financial support would transform our lives positively.

The biggest difference in my daily life is that I will always mention is that the transfer has enabled me to pay fees for my son who is in his second year. This has for sure been my major considering the fact I am the family breadwinner and solely depend on burning charcoal whereby on a good day, I could earn just KES 150. This was enough to cater to my family's basic needs and to pay for the fees on time and cater for other basic needs like foodstuffs. I have however been depending on the well-wishers which was not a guarantee as well. I have been trying to borrow loans in various microfinance to facilitate this but I was not granted. This is because I didn't have any security like a piece of land or livestock. I never had a chance to go to school and my with has been to see all my children get a good education so that their lives can be better. I am happy I was able to fulfil the dream and his future is promising courtesy of GiveDirectly.

I spent part of my first transfer on buying buiding materials such as twelve pieces of iron sheets KES 9000, building poles at KES 6000, nails, and timber. This was purposely for the construction of a new house becasue the previous one was a grass-thatched hut with a leaky roof. During the winter seasons, it used to be so stressful and hectic because we used to move from one compound to the other seeking shelter. I later spent KES 5000 for my son who is in his second year in secondary school. I am so glad that I managed to send him back to school after staying home for weeks. I also cleared the hospital bill for my disabled daughter who has been ailing for a long and unfortunately she passed on. Later on, I used the remaining amount of money, in buying enough foodstuffs for my family.