We check in with people at each stage of the cash transfer process to see how things are going. Take a look at some of their stories as they appear here in real-time.
Learn more about how recipients opt in to share their stories.
Describe the moment when you received your money. How did you feel?
Receiving the transfers meant so much to me and my family. I had no source of income and was worried on how to pay school fees. I received the transfers while I was alone doing house chores, I had an mpesa notification tone, being that I am illiterate, I had to wait for my husband to come back from work to confirm if it was a genuine one. I was so impatient till he arrived, after the confirmation I was so glad that my son would finally join form one in a boarding school.
Describe the biggest difference in your daily life since you started receiving payments from GiveDirectly.
The biggest difference in my daily life is having my son in a boarding school. It gives me an opportunity to work extra hard in the farm so as to get school fees for the following term.
What did you spend your most recent transfer(s) on?
I do subsistence farming for a living. I have been doing it manually since I have no livestock to help in cultivating the farm. I used part of the transfers to buy two cows for farming worth Kshs 35,000. I feel so relieved as this saves time unlike before when doing it manually was so tiresome.
I also used Kshs 20,000 to pay school fees for my son joining form one. Were it not for the transfers, I would have opted for a day school due to insufficient funds, although it is not condusive as the kid wakes up so early and gets home so late in the evening. I thank Give Directly for the transfers as joining a boarding school is his dream come true.
Enrolled
access_time over 2 years ago
What does receiving this money mean to you?
I am a mother of five living with my husband and my children. My husband is a mason while I just burn charcoal or split wood to make money. Currently we have two houses; one for my children and another one as main family residence. The amount of money we make with any particular period of time can only feed the family but we can not buy anything more. Therefore I do not have any form of furniture in my house except for traditional beds. Receiving this money means furnishing my house so that I can have a decent sleeping place and seats to use. On top of that I also plan to start livestock farming so that I can build my wealth.
What is the happiest part of your day?
It's been tough times over here and I can't lie that there's much to be happy about. The only time I was truly happy is when I attended GiveDirectly's community engagement and heard about the type of aid we're going to get. This made me happy because I haven't had a good amount of money for some years now. I knew for a fact that it's going to be my break through and that I will even be able to invest.
What is the biggest hardship you've faced in your life?
I do not have any reliable source of income and have to do a lot of physical work to be able to earn money. Most of the time I can only make money through burning and selling charcoal as well as splitting wood for sale. I'm getting old and these types of jobs need a lot of energy that I will not be having in the near future. I would like to get a source of income that I can still depend on even when I'm old like livestock farming.
