I do subsistence farming for a living. In the coming year and beyond, I am planning to hire a piece of land as the one I have is smaller in size. I will be hiring labour so as to save on the time wastage. I have been doing it with my two sons who are still schooling and it could take us a whole month to complete a piece of land. In addition to this, I will be opening up a new business of groceries to be operated by my wife. The business will specifically be taking care of the family's basic needs like food and clothing.

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

I am a parent of three boys who are still in Primary school, they are in classes two, four and five. Before the GiveDirectly transfers, I never had any stable source of income and providing for my family had been the most difficult task I have ever faced. I used the whole transfer of kshs 53,000 to purchase a power saw for my business. Before I bought the machine I used to hire it from someone else and this was quite expensive as I remained with very little money for my family's basic needs like food, clothing and education.

I was on my way home from fetching water from a faraway water pan. I received a text message and stopped to have a look. I was taken aback when I realized that I had received my first transfer. Emotions took the better part of me as I ululated at the top of my voice. I hurriedly walked home and shared the good news with my relatives and were all happy.

Building the house for my children is the biggest impact that the funds have made in my life. Some of my children were sleeping in neighbors’ house. I felt ashamed that I could not provide a shelter for them. I am happy that they now have a place to sleep and this help mitigate vices such as early pregnancies in my daughters.

I built a new house for my 5 children worth KES 20000. We all lived in a tiny two-roomed house that could not accommodate us all. Building the new house has created enough space to accommodate every member of the family. Besides building the house, I bought a dairy cow at KES 25000. Buying the cow allows me to have an alternative source of income. For the past three years, I sold charcoal because I had no job. I did not work on the farm because of the prolonged drought. It was a struggle for me as I earned very little and could not cater to all my family’s needs (paying school fees, buying food and clothes). Besides buying the cow, I spent KES 8000 preparing my 3 acres of farm and bought planting seeds as I wait for the right time to plant after receiving heavy rainfall for a very long time.