I have been a businessman for so many years. In the near future and beyond, I am planning to start up boutique shops which deal with women's dresses. It has high demand as women tend to buy clothes on a daily basis. I am also planning to do subsistence farming whereby I will be mostly concentrating on farming maize, when produced, I will be supplying it in boarding schools. My family is still young, I will therefore use the profits earned to save for my children's school fees as well as basic needs like food and clothing.

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 almost 8 am and I had just arrived at the place where our merry-go-round group meeting was being held. I found most people in my group happy and they were talking about the transfers having been sent. It was then that I thought of checking my phone which I had not had a look at it since last night. I found out that I had a new message which was sent at 7 am. I opened it and wow! I could not believe my eyes when I read that I had also received the KES 55000 that GiveDirectly had promised us. I was so happy and I joined in the celebration. We gave thanks to God for it because the transfer was going to help us a lot.

The transfer has brought a big difference in my life and that of my family. This is because having paid school fees for my child and having bought food for our consumption, I have managed to save most of the money that I make from my business. The business has thus improved because of this and also because I got more customers after people received the transfers.

I spent approximately KES 32000 of my recent transfer on paying school fees and buying the necessary school items for my child who was joining secondary school. A lot of money was being needed and I didn't have it since I do not have a reliable source of income. I usually do the business of buying and selling second-hand clothes. The money that I make is not much, it is usually only enough to buy food and pay for the merry-go-round group contributions. The money that I get from the group when it is my turn to receive it, usually helps me in paying school fees for my children bit by bit. As a result, I had thought of selling a calf as the only way to raise the needed money. I am, however, glad that I didn't have to resort to that because the GiveDirectly transfer came in handy. With the remaining transfer amount, I spent it on buying food, that is, maize, rice, etc and I bought clothes with some of them. I am thus so much grateful to GiveDirectly for their big support.