In the coming year, I hope to start a small kiosk business. This will be a reliable source of livelihood that will support my family's basic needs like food as well as educate my children. I intend to sell dry fish, sugar, salt and maize flour. Currently, I depend on charcoal burning which is energy-draining and characterized by low income.

In my opinion, GiveDirectly did well in coming to our village and enrolling everyone into the program without discrimination. Giving direct cash instead of material aid was a good decision that they make. I feel everything went well since the processes were elaborated clearly during the first community meeting with the officers.

I am a widow living with my 3 children. Providing for their educational needs has been a great burden on my shoulders since I am jobless. I depend on charcoal burning an activity that earns me $1 per day on average which is not enough even to feed the family. Most of the time my kids were staying at home because of huge fee arrears something that kept me worried about the future of the kids. I used $300 of the recent transfers to support the education of my 2 children who were in secondary school. Currently, I am happy that one was able to complete his secondary education and is about to join college. In addition, I bought a mattress for $45 for myself. Earlier, I was sleeping on an old, torn mattress that was not comfortable. At the moment, I am happy owning and sleeping on proper modern bedding. The remaining amount assisted me to purchase enough food for the family. It has been a long time since we had enough food harvests from our farm due to changes in the climate pattern.

It was 4 PM when I was having a good time with my family when I heard a loud vibration from my mobile phone. I was so nervous and asked one of my sons to check where the messages were coming from. The smile he wore on his face summarised everything. It was a Mpesa message from Segovia Technology. I was overexcited and I remember saying a special prayer on the same since it was like a miracle. We later gathered as a family and started celebrating till dawn.

The biggest difference in my daily life is that I now have goats as assets that I can readily depend on at any time. Goats normally reproduce twice a year and this is evident that I will have many of them within a short period. The main aim once they increase in number, will be to support my children's education journey. It has been a challenge for me because I am a widow and ailing. I have always been depending on my elder son for my daily needs. For some days, I could skip meals because he also relied on temporary casual jobs. It is now a relief to us as a family because the livestock we will be selling some and send the children to school and even fulfill other household basic needs. I am seeing this happening soon because some of the goats have started reproducing.

I spent KES 35000 of my first transfer on paying school fees for my two children who are both in boarding secondary schools. As a jobless widow, paying their school fees on time has always been a challenge to me and all I can say is that it has been God's grace to where they are now. I have been depending on government bursaries which was not a guarantee and sometimes from wellwishers. Therefore they were always at home and this has been affecting them academically. I am so happy that they are all in school studying peacefully. To add to that, I bought three goats at a total of KES 7900. These have been the most valuable assets that I have been yearning to keep in my compound but I couldn't afford them because they were very expensive. To add to that, I bought a mattress at KES 4900 to replace the old one. With the remaining amount of money, I bought foodstuffs for my family which took us almost two weeks.