We check in with people at each stage of the cash transfer process to see how things are going. Take a look at some of their stories as they appear here in real-time.
Learn more about how recipients opt in to share their stories.
Describe the moment when you received your money. How did you feel?
It was 7 am and I was in the kitchen preparing breakfast for my family when I thought of checking my phone to see if I had any missed calls or new messages. I went to get it from the main house. I saw that I had a new message and I opened it to check the contents. I was surprised when I found out that it was an SMS indicating that we had received KES 55000 from GiveDirectly just as they had promised. I immediately informed my husband of the good news and he was so happy on hearing it. We gave thanks to God since we were now going to be able to fulfill the plans that we had already laid down. We then prepared ourselves and we, later on, went to withdraw the money.
Describe the biggest difference in your daily life since you started receiving payments from GiveDirectly.
The biggest difference that the transfer has brought into our lives is that we now have a cow of our own. We hence have enough supply of milk for our consumption. Our child thus no longer lacks milk which is good for her health.
What did you spend your most recent transfer(s) on?
We spent most of our recent transfer on buying a cow that came with its calf. We bought it at KES 54000. We bought the cow because we didn't have our own. The one we use to have was not ours, we had borrowed it from someone. When GiveDirectly, came to enroll us in our village, the owner told us that he was willing to sell us the cow if we were going to pay him KES 80000. We told him that we didn't have such a large sum of money and hence he came and took his cow a week before the transfers were sent. We hence decided to buy our own since we no longer had a source of milk for our consumption. With the remaining transfer amount, we spent it on buying sugar and beans for our consumption. We are thus grateful to GiveDirectly for their big support to us.
Enrolled
access_time over 2 years ago
What does receiving this money mean to you?
Receiving this money means a better livelihood for my family. We have been struggling to provide food especially milk For our three young children. We spend as much as KES 2000 a month purchasing milk and KES 2800 a month on maize flour. This strains us a lot as we have one main source of income ( Motorbike business)which is also unreliable due to competition and wear and tear. We plan to use KES 35000 to buy one dairy cow which will reduce my daily expenditure of buying milk as well as earn me an income through the sale of milk. For the rest of the amount, I plan to improve my clothes business
What is the happiest part of your day?
For the last one month, a friend offered to be giving us milk so we could be paying whenever we get the money. It is such a relief for us, as at now, I do not stress anymore where to get milk for my young children, am assured I will get it unlike before when we could go without.
What is the biggest hardship you've faced in your life?
The main challenge is food insecurity. We live in a semi-dry area that experiences very low rainfall making the availability of fresh food and clean water a challenge. Sometimes we could have money to purchase foodstuff but the food itself is unavailable so we end up not having food especially milk. We have to go to bigger centers to get milk which is a distance from home and the prices there are high, double the one we could afford in the village.
