Since my family is still young. I am planning to buy a piece of land to buy rentals. I do subsistence farming for a living, when the farm produce will be in excess, I will be selling out some of them to get money for buying the land. I will be building houses for rentals in the coming year and beyond, the money collected from the rentals will be taking care of the family's upkeep like food, clothing and school fees.

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. Another thing that GiveDirectly does well is that 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. 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.

I am a parent of three children. Two are in Primary School, a boy and a girl, while the other is in Secondary School in his form one. I used a total of kshs 20,000 to clear their school fees arrears that have accumulated for the past year. Before the transfers, I was living in a small grass-thatched house and it could not fit all my family members. The boys used to sleep in my neighbour's house and this was so inconvenient as they could go so early due to insecurity in my community as most homes do not have access to electricity. I used the remaining part of the transfers of kshs 30,000 to build a spacious decent house for my family. I am so grateful to GiveDirectly transfers.

It was in the evening around 5 pm. I was leaving work at the construction site near my home. As I was walking home, I noticed the unread message on my phone and immediately read the message, which confirmed that I was KES 55,000 richer. I was happy and surprised that my wife already suspected I had received the cash when I reached home. She later explained that the neighbor told her that the support funds had been sent.

The biggest difference in my daily life since I received the funds is buying the dairy cow which has helped my family save on the milk expenses and earn as little as KES 200 a day for our daily expenses. I also was among the customers who took advantage of the price of maize, because at the moment the price has gone up due to the high demand and the low supply of maize in our area.

I spent my cash transfer to buy a dairy cow for KES 35,000. The milk from the cow has been a source of income that has been supportive and has saved my family on the daily milk expenses. We have been having food challenges and because of the change in climate, there is an inadequate supply of maize, which is the key component of our staple food(‘ugali”). Therefore, I bought two bags of 100Kg maize for KES 10,300 to cover my small family for the next three months. The remaining amount was spent on changing my family’s wardrobe because, for a long time with my financial challenges, had not bought them any new clothes, and some of them were worn out.