My long-term goal is to add more stock to my business, increase my business to twenty goats, and take it to the market twice a week. This would help me increase my income and pay school fees without strain.

Whenever I have an issue with my money, I call the free hotline number. This has helped me communicate without worrying about the minutes I use. It is helpful.

All my life I have worked in the masonry world. I get paid daily as per the contract. For most jobs, I get $5, which I use to buy food and clothing for my two children and my wife. Because the contracts have not been regular, I am not able to pay school fees on time and most days my children are out of school and I am forced to borrow money from friends. Receiving this money has helped me start a business selling livestock, I buy a goat at $60 and sell it at $75 at the market every Monday. I spent the transfer to buy five goats which cost $300, the rest of the money was spent on installing ceiling boards in my house. The money I get from the business has helped me fence my compound, and bought chicken for domestic use.

It was around 4:55 pm and I was at work place busy with my masonry work. I had left my coat which had my phone aside. I hence didn't hear new messages or calls coming through. It was until later that I checked my phone and I found out I had several missed calls from the people at home and a new message. I opened the message since we had been eagerly waiting for the transfer from GiveDirectly. Our transfer had delayed and most of the people in my village had already received theirs the previous day. I was so happy when I read the contents of the SMS, it was indicating that we had also received the KES 55000 from GiveDirectly. I now knew that the many missed calls from my family members were because they wanted to find out if I had received the transfer. I immediately called them and I broke to good news which made them so happy.

The biggest difference that the transfer has brought into our lives as a family is that we have been able to accomplish our goal of building other houses. This is something that we never thought we will be able to achieve in a short period since we didn't have the money to buy the expensive iron sheets. We are thus glad because the house that we managed to build is big and it is enough to accommodate guests visiting our household. The children are also happy because they have new clothes to wear, they hence look good and clean in them.

We spent most of the recent transfer money on building other houses. We built the main house and the kitchen at a total cost of approximately KES 45000. We decided to build the houses because we only had one house which was small in size and the space was no longer enough for our growing family. We had trees for building, so we only incurred the cost of cutting them down and we bought 58 iron sheets. We had thought of building another house before but we didn't have the money for buying the very costly iron sheets. So when GiveDirectly came with their program to our village, we saw the opportunity to achieve our dream. With the remaining transfer money, we used KES 5000 on paying back a debt, and the other KES 5000 we bought clothes for our two children.