I do subsistence farming for a living. I have been growing grass to feed my cow although in small quantities. In the coming year and beyond, I will hire a bigger piece of land to grow varieties of grass to be sold to those keeping livestock like cows. There are very few people from my community doing such a business as the process is so involving. This will yield enough profits for the basic needs like food , clothing and education for the children who are still in Primary School.

In my opinion, what GiveDirectly does well in this program is that we receive the transfers in lumpsum amounts. This helps in planning as one is in a position to do something huge as compared to when the transfers are given in small instalments. Another thing that GiveDirectly does well is that the unlearned recipients are taught how to use mpesa. This has reduced the number of theft cases in the community as most of us managed to change our pins to a more secure code. What needs to be done differently is enrolling all the individuals in the household to avoid household conflict. During enrollment, those individuals who did not have responsibilities by then were left out of the program yet these are the same people who steal from their old and vulnerable parents. Another thing that needs to be done differently is enrolling all the communities in a specific village for uniformity purposes and this will prevent too many complaints coming from the communities that are left out during the registration to the programs.

I am a parent of five who are teenagers. Before I was enrolled in this program I had a small grass thatched house that could not accommodate all my children. During the rainy season it was leaking and this destroyed most of my valuable items. Again, in my community grass for roofing is not easily available and so repairing the roof was quiet expensive as I had to source them from somewhere else. I used kshs 40,000 of the transfers to build a very spacious house that could fit all my family members. I also bought a cow for kshs 10,000 for milk production for my family consumption. I am thankful to GiveDirectly for the transfers.

I was busy in the farm when my child gave me my phone claiming that I had an unread message. Upon reading the Mpesa message that I had just received, I became so happy and immediately called GiveDirectly so that I would thank them for the transfer. This money gave me hope that we would be able to start buying some building materials earlier than expected.

Before GiveDirectly came for enrollment, we had a plan of building a more permanent house. We expected to start buying building materials in November this year using the savings that we will be given from our merry-go-round group but I am happy that we have been able to achieve this earlier than we had planned. This has given me hope that I will soon achieve all of my goals and I am grateful to GiveDirectly for contributing to this.

We had a long-term goal of building a more decent and permanent house as a family before GiveDirectly came for enrollment. We were planning to spend the savings that we will be given in the month of November to start this project. When we received our recent transfer, we spent KES 50000 to purchase some building materials like ballast, hardcore, and iron sheets and used KES 4700 to buy some new clothes for my children. I am now glad since our savings and second transfer will help boost this project.