In the coming year and beyond, I am expecting to have a savings account for my children and this will cater for their school fees. After harvesting, I will be selling the excess farm produce like maize and beans to take care of the basic needs like food, shelter and school fees for my young family.

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 do subsistence farming for a living. I have a huge piece of land that is done by casual workers . During rainy season it takes a long of time to farm and this affects harvesting time. I used all my tranfers to buy a piece of land for kshs 30,000 and bought a cow for farming with the rest of the transfers for kshs 20,000.

It was 6:55 am and I was still sleeping when suddenly I heard my phone ringing hence notifying me of an incoming new message. I reached out for it from where I had placed it the previous night as I wondered what the SMS was all about. I opened it and wow! I was surprised when I read that I had received KES 55000 in my mobile money account that GiveDirectly had promised us. I was so happy that I immediately woke up. My husband who was still asleep wondered what was going on and I told him what had transpired. He was so happy on hearing this and we celebrated together giving thanks to God since 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. Our lives have changed, for the better and we are no longer like before. We now have another cow that is going to provide us with milk that we can consume and sell when it calves. We also managed to buy a sewing machine and hence plans to open my tailoring shop once I complete my studies are underway. We also managed to take a step towards achieving our dream of building another house by buying the iron sheets. This all was only possible because of the help from GiveDirectly. Thank you so much and may God bless you.

We spent KES 17000 of the recent transfer on buying a sewing machine. We bought it because I have trained in tailoring and I have a plan to start a tailoring shop of my own once I complete my studies. I am casually employed by someone at her tailoring shop. The money that she pays me at the end of the month has been helping me in paying for my tuition fees in college since I am still training. I am expecting to complete my training this coming December. We also spent KES 15000 on buying a calf. We bought the calf so that it can help us in the future when it calves in providing us with milk that we can consume and sell some. With the remaining transfer amount, we spent it on buying 26 iron sheets. We have a plan to build another house since we only have one house. We were not able to do so before although it has always been our wish since we didn't have the large sum of money that is needed to do so. My husband is casually employed as a motorcycle taxi rider. The money that he gets from his work is not much, it is only enough to buy food and some essential household items. We are thus grateful to GiveDirectly for coming up with this program of helping the less fortunate to our village.