I have been a businessman for so many years. In the near future and beyond, I am planning to start up boutique shops which deal with women's dresses. It has high demand as women tend to buy clothes on a daily basis. I am also planning to do subsistence farming whereby I will be mostly concentrating on farming maize, when produced, I will be supplying it in boarding schools. My family is still young, I will therefore use the profits earned to save for my childrens school fees as well as basic needs like food and clothing.

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.

I am a parent of three boys who are still in Primary school, they are in classes two, four and five. Before the GiveDirectly transfers, I never had any stable source of income and providing for my family had been the most difficult task I have ever faced. I used part of the transfers of kshs 30,000 to build an extension to my house as the one I had was small in size and could not accommodate our farm produce. Before the transfers, thieves could take advantage of this and most of the farm produce was stolen during the night as I could hide them behind our main house. I used the rest of the transfers of kshs 20,000 to buy more stock for my business of second-hand clothes. While the rest of the transfers of kshs 3,150 catered for basic needs like food and clothing. I thank GiveDirectly for the transfers.

It was almost 7:30 am and we were still sleeping when suddenly I heard my phone ringing notifying me of a new message. I immediately reached out for my phone and I opened the SMS to check what it was all about. I was surprised and I could not believe it when I read that I had received KES 55000 in my mobile money account from GiveDirectly. I told my wife about it as I showed her the SMS. She was so happy on hearing this but we thought it was a prank. To clear our doubts, we decided to buy some airtime from my mobile money account and that is when we confirmed that indeed it was true. We were so happy and we celebrated together giving thanks to God.

The biggest difference that the transfer has brought into our daily lives is that we are no longer suffering like before. The cloth-selling business is doing well and we are making good money that is enough for us to meet all our basic needs comfortably.

We spent KES 41000 of our recent transfer on starting a new business of buying and selling clothes. We also spent KES 3000 on paying for the business rent of the place where we were going to conduct our business. We decided to start the business because we are still a young family and we wanted something that was going to sustain us and help us in the future, especially with the payment of school fees for our children. Other than that, we bought two sheep which are our investment. The sheep are going to reproduce and multiply in number quickly. We can sell some of them in the future and use the money in buying a cow. We also bought a mattress and with the remaining transfer amount of about KES 5000, we spent it on buying clothes for ourselves and the children. We are thus grateful to GiveDirectly for coming up with this program of helping the needy in the society. May God bless you abundantly.