In my opinion, I feel like GiveDirectly has been doing everything perfectly as the whole process was very transparent. I urge you to continue supporting the less fortunate in the society and empower them through the unconditional cash transfers.

I have been burning and selling charcoal to earn living while my wife has been hawking cooked food in the neighborhood and that way, we have been supporting each other to raise our four children. The prevailing drought season has made my job more harder as I have to dig up tree roots and burn them to get charcoal, a process that takes a week only to get KES 400. We realized that, all our income can only cover basic needs and therefore, we made a decision to be savings KES 1450 each monthly in a sacco since my wife is also enrolled for us to save towards our kids school fees. I saved KES 1450 in a sacco, spend KES 800 to settle debt that I had and spend the balance to buy food.

The message arrived very early in the morning that day and to mention that I was extremely happy does not even come close to what I felt at that particular moment and day. I was stunned, but in the best of ways because all the debts I had were weighing on my conscious, you barely sleep when you have so many things to worry about especially if this things include the very well being of your family. I was filled with the utmost excitement.

This transfers helped me restore trust between me and a couple of people including the school administration where my children studied and owner to the store where I took things on loan to feed my family. Can you imagine the debt had stayed for almost close to over a month and I had not paid it? Plus in the situation I was in I would have probably taken maybe another month to pay. I could no longer even get items anymore. So after receiving the money and paying what I owed it was such a huge relief for me and I also restored faith and the relationship between me and the storekeeper and I kept my word which meant a lot to me.

Before receiving the money I had been having a very stressful week since two of my children had been kicked out of school due to the fact that I had not paid their tuition debt in full. I wanted to pay it, but I have no job that supports my family permanently, but rather rely on farming and casual jobs once in a while. My children had stayed home for two days before the money arrived and after I received the money I took KES1,600 and paid for the both of them and the following day they were on their merry way back to school. On the other hand, I took a portion of what was left and paid some of the debts that I had. I took KES 960 and paid at one of the stores since I used to take items from them especially food, during those days where I had nothing to feed the family and promised to pay the owner once I received the money. After that I was left with KES 440 which I used to purchase at least two bags of maize flour, beans and sugar that would enable me to provide a meal for the family in the mean time.