The Guardian | ‘Just money, with no strings attached’: how direct cash transfers are giving women in rural Kenya a new life
Two months ago, Claris Pendo’s days always followed the same routine. She would rise early, sharpen her tools, walk several kilometres to the forest, cut down a tree, drag it back to her village in Kenya’s Kilifi county, chop it into smaller pieces, dig a pit, cover the wood with soil and branches, and set it alight. Then she would go home and prepare a simple meal of ugali (Kenya’s maize staple).
She would keep returning to the pit until the wood had carbonised – a process that can take days – then pack the charcoal into sacks and wait for people on motorbikes to come and collect it. Then she would start all over again.
Now five months pregnant, Pendo, 35, says she hasn’t burned charcoal for two months, after receiving a cash transfer of 110,000 shillings (£660). Instead, she grazes the livestock she bought with the money – six goats and two cows. “I feel much better. This will be my seventh child, and it is the first time I feel certain my baby will be properly nourished,” she says from the yard of her home in the village of Unaya Ndogo.
A study published in August by the National Bureau of Economic Research which looked at the impact of unconditional cash transfers found that they reduced infant mortality by 48% and under-five mortality by 45% in rural Kenya – effects rivalling those of vaccines or antimalarial drugs. The study looked at the period between 2014 and 2017 when the NGO GiveDirectly sent payments of up to $1,000 (£740) to 10,500 households in more than 650 villages in Kenya.
