Since I am the bread winner of five, I am planning to practice subsistence farming for a living. I will buy a larger piece of land since I do not own one as at now. In the past years I had been hiring the land for farming which was quite expensive as I used it only during rainy season. With the good harvest of maize,beans, tomatoes and onions , my lifestyle will be better as I will be able to provide basic needs for my family since I will be selling out some of them when produced in excess. I also have a plan of raising livestock like chicken, sheep and goats. Currently I have some few chicken, in the coming year and beyond I will add more for sale. I will be selling out the eggs and for consumption.

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. To avoid household conflict, what needs to be done differently is enrolling all the individuals in the household. 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. The vulnerable like orphans, those living with disabilities and the HIV positive should be enrolled in different programs with huge amounts of transfers as they do not have any source of income, and most of the days they sleep hungry.

Before the transfers, I never had cows before as I had no source of income. I used the transfers to buy female cows for kshs 35,000. I decided to buy female cows for milk production for my family's consumption and sale. I do casual work to earn a living and most of the time the pay is too little to cater for my basic needs, I do top it up with the money from selling milk and this has enabled me to take care of other basic needs like food, clothing and kids school fees. I used the remaining part of the transfers to buy a piece of three-seater furniture. I used to fear hosting friends and relatives as I never had enough seats for them, but my self-esteem has improved since I started receiving transfers from GiveDirectly.

It was 6 am and I was in the kitchen preparing tea for my family when suddenly my phone rang hence notifying me of a new message. I stopped to check it and I could not believe my eyes when I read that I had received KES 55000 from GiveDirectly as promised. I was so happy that my children who were with me noticed the sudden change of mood. They asked me what was going on and I happily told them what had transpired. I then immediately called my husband and I informed him about the good news. He was so happy too on hearing this and we thanked God for it. We now knew that we were going to fulfill the plans that we had made.

The transfer has brought a big difference in our lives as a family. We managed to expand our kitchen and hence the children now have enough space to sleep in. We also now own sheep and a calf which are going to be of great help to us in the future. The sheep are going to reproduce and multiply in number and we can sell some to get money for school fees. The calf when it calves is going to provide us with milk for our consumption and we will no longer have to incur the cost of buying some.

We spent KES 10000 of our recent transfer on building a bigger kitchen. The one that we had was small and the space was not enough for the children to sleep in. We thus decided to expand it. Other than that, we bought a calf at KES 6000 and three sheep at a total cost of KES 15000. We decided to buy the calf so that it could provide us with milk in the future when it calves. We do not have a source of milk and hence we usually buy some. We usually buy two liters every day from a milk-cooling plant at a total cost of KES 120. The sheep are also going to help us in the future when they will have reproduced and multiplied in number. We can sell some and use the money on other important things such as paying school fees for our children. We have been meaning to do the above for quite some time but we just didn't have the money. We are small-scale farmers and we usually grow crops such as sweet potatoes, maize, and beans for sale. The money that we get is not much, most of it usually goes to the purchase of milk and maize for our consumption. We also bought 2 sofa-set chairs at KES 6000 and with the remaining transfer amount, we spent it on buying maize for our consumption. Thank you so much GiveDirectly for the support.