The transfers from GiveDirectly enabled me to achieve a lot. I was able to buy a cow with the first transfer, something I never had before. The cow however does not have a shed and hence my new goal is to build one. I also have a goal to plant nappier grass for the cow to feed on. With the dairy shed, the cow will have somewhere to feed on and rest. I decided to venture into dairy farming so that my wife who currently does not have a job will have something to do to keep her busy and earn some income. She can sell the milk from the cow and get some money for meeting the small basic needs of the family when I am away from home to do some work.

In my opinion, what GiveDirectly did well is carrying out door-to-door registration. This is because by doing so, we got an opportunity to interact with them one-on-one and ask questions that we could not be able to ask at the community meeting. Other than that, their staff members were not biased when conducting enrollment. They wanted people to be honest and they enrolled everyone who said the truth fairly. I thus do not see anything that went wrong.

When we got our recent transfer, we had no plans of improving our house. The plan came about when we heard that one of our neighbors was selling some trees. We decided to buy the trees and cut them down for timber which cost us approximately KES 20000 doing so plus buying the nails. The house that we have been living in was made of mud on the walls and floor. Getting good mud for mudding the house every time it gets bitten by rain has become quite a challenge. We are usually forced to buy some. We thus decided to transform it by replacing the mud walls with timber planks. The construction is still ongoing, we are yet to cement the floor. Since I am a mason, we only anticipate spending KES 15000 more on buying the materials that are still needed to finish the construction. I plan to spend the remaining amount on paying dowry for my wife. We are hence glad and grateful to GiveDirectly because our standards of living have been uplifted and we are no longer the same as before. Thank you.

I was busy at work when I heard a message alert on my phone but did not bother to read or check who the sender was. This was because I did not want anything interrupting me and I decided that I would reply to all the messages and return all the calls at a later time when I was done with my work. As I was reading through the messages, the Mpesa message caught my attention and I was overjoyed upon reading it. This message gave me hope that I would finally fulfill my plans.

My life is not the way it was before because I now have an asset in my homestead that I can depend on in case of an emergency. In addition, I will be earning income through the sale of surplus when it calves and also be able to save the money that I would otherwise spend on milk. Feeding it every morning and evening gives me joy and satisfaction since I see a bright future where I will no longer buy milk on a daily basis like before. My children are always full of joy since they know that they will have milk in plenty very soon.

The main challenge that we've been facing as a family is the burden of buying milk daily as we usually spend at least KES 50 on a liter. This was only enough to make tea and we sometimes had to take tea without milk when we did not have money to use in buying milk. I am a mason and getting this job sometimes is hard and we have to survive on debts and sometimes do some menial work around the neighborhood. When I received my transfer, I decided to buy a dairy cow worth KES 38000, one sack of maize at KES 3500, KES 1000 to pay school fees for my niece who stays with me and I spent the remaining amount on other kinds of foodstuffs and clothes for the family.