I am planning to start up a small business of selling scrap metals. I have done it before and so I have experience in it, besides it has high demand as most of people are not so knowlegble about it. Besides, I will have a hardware shop beside it to attract many clients. I have young children who are still in Primary School, I will be saving the profits from the business to cater for their school fees to avoid them being in and out of the school, this will help them to improve in their studies as they will be attending all the classes without missing any.

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 five children. Two are in Secondary School, a boy and a girl, while the other is in college studying Information Technology in his first year. 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 at 5 pm and we were at a merry-go-round group meeting with my group members when suddenly our phones rang simultaneously notifying us of new messages. Everyone became curious and we checked our phones. We were taken by surprise when we found out that the messages were indicating that we had received the promised transfer of KES 55000 from GiveDirectly. We were so happy and we celebrated together in joy on receiving the piece of good news that we decided to postpone our meeting to another time.

The transfer has brought a big difference in our lives as a family. We are happy because we now have milk for our consumption and we no longer have to go about in the morning to look for some. As a result of this, we are able to prepare tea in time for our children and they have not run late going to school since then.

Our priority upon receiving the transfer was to buy a cow which we bought at KES 37000. We didn't own one and we had for a long time hoped to buy it to provide us with milk. Every morning we were being forced to look for milk and buy it for use in preparing tea for our school-going children. The source of milk was not reliable and at times we fail to get some. Such kind of challenges used to make our children to run late going to school. Other than the above, we spent KES 30000 of our transfer money on paying school fees for our three children in secondary school. I had some amount with me which I had gotten from the merry-go-round group meeting which I added to the transfer money for it to be enough to execute our laid down plans. So with the remaining amount, we bought maize for our consumption and paid the parents-teachers association (PTA) money for our three children in primary school. For this, we are grateful to GiveDirectly for their big support.