My life is different than how it would have been had I not received the transfer because I now live in an iron roofed house unlike before. Due to this, I can also harvest rain water for domestic purposes during the rainy season. Also, it will enable me have some time to concentrate on other things instead of going to the river to fetch water. Building of an iron roofed house is an achievement to me since I will not be going through the stress of moving things in my house from one place to another during the rainy season due to leaking roof.

In my opinion, GiveDirectly does well by uplifting people's lives through transfers and I do not see anything that they do not do well.

When I received my transfer, I spent KES 25,000 to purchase a dairy cow. I decided on this so that when it reproduces, I will be able to earn some income through the sell of surplus and also save the money I would otherwise use in buying milk. Also, I spent around KES 20,000 to build a more spacious kitchen for my family. I settled on this so that whenever we have visitors, they will have a place to sleep. I spent the remaining amount to buy a solar panel and battery. This will help us in lighting and it will also enable my children to study in the evening without struggling to see.

It was early in the morning and I was just from waking up. I decided to check my phone and to my surprise, I saw the Mpesa SMS on my phone saying that I had received my first transfer of 55000/= from GiveDirectly. I was extremely excited about this and I immediately called my husband who was away to inform him of the good news. He was so happy to hear this. He told me to go and withdraw the money and keep it safe so that we can come and plan together on how we were going to spend it. I thanked God and GiveDirectly for what they had done to us.

The transfer has helped us in a big way and it has thus created a big difference in our lives. We were able to build another kitchen that is bigger and roofed with iron sheets. With this kitchen, guests visiting our household like my mother will have somewhere to spend the night and we will no longer have to borrow a place for them to stay in. Our children too will have a nice place to sleep. Also, having added some furniture in our household, that is, a chair and two tables, the house looks much better. We can now hence sit comfortably and chat together with family and friends. The two bags of maize that we bought, will sustain us for quite a while and hence we will not have any worry about what we are going to eat as we wait for the ones on the farm to ripen.

The money from GiveDirectly has helped me in various ways. I have built another kitchen that is bigger and roofed with iron sheets. Since it is planting season in our area, the money helped me in tilling the land and buying seeds for planting. I also bought some furniture with the money, I had only one chair in my house and hence I decided to buy another one and two tables. With the remaining amount of money, I used it in buying two bags of maize for my family consumption. The reason why we decided to settle on doing the above with the money, is because these are things that we need the most. I have always had the desire to build another kitchen that is bigger than the one I have. The one that I have is very small in size and it is grass-thatched. It has thus not been enough to accommodate any guests visiting and hence we have had to borrow the neighbors a place where our guests can spend the night. This idea of building another bigger kitchen has however been hard to fulfill due to financial constraints. The little amounts of money that we have been getting have been going to payment of school fees for our children and buying food. With having received the transfer, we saw an opportunity that we have been waiting for as having come to life. We were thus able to fulfill our plan of building another kitchen. Thank you GiveDirectly.