Yes, I have a new goal of starting a small business. To be more specific, I have plans of starting a shoe selling business. Starting up a business will make life for us much more affordable and will relief me from the daily casual work that I do to make ends meet. Having bought a dairy cow from my first transfer and built a new house from my second transfer, my energies shall now be focused on starting this business. It may be a little hard for me to actualize this soon since we still rely entirely on casual jobs to earn a living. From the casual work that we do, we earn almost just enough to feed our family of three. We hope that with the dairy cow that we bought, we can be able to sell the surplus milk once the production is up and use the money to help start this business. I am however eternally grateful for all the support that I got from GiveDirectly and how it has changed my life in a positive way.

In my opinion GiveDirectly did very well by keeping good their promise of offering support in form of cash. Looking at some of the things that I was able to accomplish has made me quite happy together with my family. It is very common to hear of organisations who makes promises to people and they end up not fulfilling those promises. GiveDirectly has been very different, making sure that they keep their promise of sending us cash. The concept of giving the support in form of cash gave people the opportunity to choose how best they were going to spend the money and it is worth noting that people had different preferences and tastes in terms of what they want done.

I used KES 30000 to build a new house and another KES 10000 to buy goats for keeping. The remaining amount was used to buy food and school clothes for my children. For a long time, my family and I have been staying in a single roomed house that is grass thatched and with a leaking roof. Each and every passing day, I was reminded of the need to build a new house or improve the one we had but sadly I did not have the money to do this. I hoped against hope that some day we would be able to accumulate enough money to be able to put up a better structure. The situation got worse whenever there were rains and we had to keep shifting our sleeping positions to where we would not be rained on. This pained me a lot and I often felt like I was failing as a parent. I could not do this though because I could raise at most KES 400 per day from the casual work that I did. I am so happy that we did not only build a new house but also improved the house we were living in before by changing the roofing. The roof does not leak anymore and this has meant that we have a separate extra room that serves as a kitchen and a sleeping place for our children. My whole family is extremely happy about this. I do not know how much longer we would have had to wait before we could fix this up had we not received the money.

I felt so happy the moment I received money from GiveDirectly. I was in the village together with other villagers since we had lost a neighbour and we were planning on his burial. When I saw the message I stayed calm and waited for the evening to come where I shared the good news with my wife. We already had plans on how to use the money to and all we could do was to put our plans into action.

The biggest difference in my daily life is the fact that I now have a new house that is fully built and this has made my family very happy. We now have a place to call home unlike before. My family and I have been staying in a house owned by our parents and we had really wanted to own one but we could not due to the little amount we got from casual work

I used almost the entire transfer of KES 30000to build a new house and used some to buy household furniture. I used another KES 5000 to start poultry keeping and used another KES 5000 to pay school fees and buy school uniforms for my children and the remainder was used to buy food for family. I chose to build a new house since the house that I owned was grass thatched and with a leaking roof that would be very uncomfortable to live in especially during the rainy season since it had a leaking roof. I could not accumulate enough money from my casual work to be able to build a new house. The amount of money that I got was just enough to buy food and maybe pay school fees for my three children.