Since I was able to build a house for my family. I am now looking forward to focus on modern farming so that I can be able to harvest a good yield for both family consumption and surplus for economic purposes. This means that I will be able to help my husband pay school fees for our four children thus building a better future for them.

What GiveDirectly does well is helping us financially to raise our standards of living and achieve our goals. I wouldn't have managed to build a permanent house for my family on my own and so as to many others in the community. May you never get tired of uplifting the poor.

Ever since I was married, I was living in a muddy grass-thatched house where I bore my four children. The house was not so strong and I was living in fear that it will be blown by wind someday and will will have no where to put our heads under. With my husband who is the primary earner working as a motorcycle taxi rider and earning $3 per day, we were not able to build a better house. When we were enrolled in to the program, our major goal was to build a permanent house. Since we were able to make bricks by our own, the first transfer enabled us to build a two bed room structure and I was able to the roofing and other finishing when I received my second transfer. I am so grateful to GiveDirectly for making this possible because I could not have achieved this on my own.

It was almost 5 pm and I was at home relaxing and taking the evening tea with my husband and my father-in-law 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 saw that we had received the promised transfer of KES 55000 from GiveDirectly. I was so happy and I immediately shared the good news with them as I showed my husband the SMS. They were so happy too and we celebrated together. 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 are happy that we are going to achieve our goal of starting a shop business. It has always been our wish to start one so that it can help us get a sustainable income that can enable us educate our children in the future comfortably.

We spent KES 30000 of the recent transfer on improving our house. We bought timber at a total cost of KES 25000 and we used KES 5000 to pay for labor. Our house was mud-walled and we decided to replace it with timber because getting mud for mudding the walls had become a big challenge to us. Apart from that, the mud walls usually get bitten by rains. We have always wanted to improve the house but due to lack of money we were not able to. I am a small-scale subsistence farmer while my husband is a motorcycle taxi driver. The money that he makes from his business most of it usually goes to the purchase of food for our family of six and paying for the merry-go-round contributions. Other than that, we also spent KES 1500 on treatment of one of our children. She had fallen ill the morning of the day that the transfer was sent and we didn't have the money to take her to the hospital. So when we got the transfer, we thanked God and we immediately took her to the hospital. She has not yet fully recovered, she still has to go for check-ups. We also spent KES 4000 on buying herbal medicine for two of our children. We also spent another KES 10000 on repaying back a debt and buying clothes for the children. With the remaining amount of about KES 10000 we used it in paying for a deposit for timber that we plan to use in constructing a shop. We want to start a shop business so that it can help us get more income. We are thus so much thankful to GiveDirectly for their help.