In the next one year and beyond my plan is to improve my grocery selling business and in turn raise enough money to pay school fees and make our lives better as a family. I have one child in secondary school while another one in grade seven and I am staring at a situation where I will be required to pay school fees. This calls for us to save up enough money to be able to do this comfortably. It will therefore be top among my priorities to do this.

In my opinion GiveDirectly does well by giving their support in form of cash. Getting cash and freedom to choose how to spend this cash was just priceless. Looking at the house that I built and the heifer that I bought makes me just happy and proud. The feeling is even across the village as everyone got to invest the money in the ways they felt most comfortable with.

When I received my second transfer of $550, I used $160 to buy a heifer. Another $330 was used to complete the construction of a house that I had built using my first transfer. I then used the remaining amount of approximately $700 was to buy clothes, food and other basic household needs for my family. I also got to install solar system in my house that will help me light up my house. I am so grateful for what GiveDirectly transfers have seen me do. They are things I would not have done anytime soon had I not received the money. My husband does motorcycle operation while I sell vegetables to earn an income. Being a mother of four and with the many needs that comes with it I have not been able to save enough from my work which has kept some of my goals at bay.

It was a few minutes past 10 pm when I wanted to go to bed after my children were done with their evening studies when I received a message notification on my phone. I became so happy after reading its contents and immediately informed my family who in turn were overjoyed with the news. I spent a few minutes with my spouse on that night deliberating on how we would use the cash to achieve our goals as a family and as a family, we are grateful to GiveDirectly for giving us a helping hand to achieve our dreams.

I always have to walk for around 6 hours to and from fetching clay soil to use in cleaning our house. This was tedious and time-consuming as I would have to make one trip for a week. Currently, I am foreseeing a big change in my life due to the impact of the GiveDirectlys transfers since I have already spent part of my first transfer to buy some timber. We are planning to use them to replace the walls of our current house that are made of mud. With this, cleaning it will have been made easier and less time-consuming.

I paid a down payment for a piece of land last year that my immediate neighbor was selling. We had an agreement with him that we would be paying for it in bits and we would become the real owners after we were through with the payments. I am a vegetable vendor and I was using the profits from this business towards achieving this while my spouse caters for our basic needs and also paying school fees for our three children. From the KES 55000 that we received, I spent KES 27000 to clear paying for this land, used KES 20000 to buy some timber that we will use in renovating our house, and spent the remaining amount on food and clothes. The desire of living in a semi-permanent house made of timber walls made us purchase some timber and we are planning to spend part of our next transfer to buy the remaining materials and pay for the labor. I believe that it will not be costly as we're planning to destroy the walls of our current house and replace them with timber.