"I was at home tending to my animals when I heard of a message alert, I was surprised and overwhelmed when I saw a message that I had received a sum of $500 from GiveDirectly, I immediately called my husband and gave him the good news, he was excited, happy and most of all grateful."

"The biggest hardship I have faced in my life is lack of regular income to cater for my basic needs.This is because I rely on casual labour such as cutting poles for building houses, fetching water for my neighbours which earn me very little.This makes me struggle to meet my basic needs.Sometimes, I borrow food from relatives, situation that embarrasses me."

"The biggest hardship I have ever faced in my household is the leaking house.This is because Iam a house wife and rely on subsistence farming which for the last three years it has not rained enough resulting to poor harvest.This makes me find it hard to renovate the house because the little we get goes to food.Sometime when it is raining I stay awake drawing water that has leaked from the iron sheets, a situation that makes me feel sad."

"The biggest hardship I have ever faced in life is lack of money. Lack of money has made it impossible for my wife to go to a tailoring school. It makes me sad seeing my being idle at home. She is forced to fully depend on me."

"Food security and decent housing has been our ambition for the past 2 years. Receiving this money means that these ambitions will be met. My plan is to own a big house. The current house I live in is very small considering my growing family of one child and a husband. I will use the first transfer (55,000 Kenyan shillings) to build a house that will comfortable accommodate us as a family. I will then use 30,000 Kenyan shillings of the second transfer to buy two bulls and 8,000 Kenyan shillings to buy an ox drawn plough. This will help in ploughing our 1 acre piece of land for maize production. For the past 2 and a half years, we have been ploughing the land ourselves which is very laborious."

"My husband's humble background acts as the biggest hardship we have faced in life. This is because all the hurdles we are going through emanate from his family. His single parent has no reliable source of income, something that has made us not afford to pay our university fees. In brief, my husband's graduation has been delayed due to fee arrears accumulated up to 1340 USD. Since I friend solely on my husband's income to raise my university fees, failure for him to graduate worsens the situation since he cannot get permanent emplyment. In that regard, we rely on his relatively low income of about 70 USD monthly. I am looking forward to joining the second year in the university any time soon, though I do not have the required fees now."

"Securing a good job for my family has been the biggest hardship I have faced in life. He works as a casual laborer at our nearby center, his wages are not enough to fulfill all our needs such as food and shelter. Hence making it difficult for us to renovate our house."

"My husband uses to work as a conductor in our nearby town, but this job came to an end 5 years ago. Since this happened, life has been challenging because he was the only breadwinner to our family. Both of us now depend on casual jobs which are not guaranteed and gives us 400 shillings which is not enough to sustain all our basic needs such as food. Therefore, securing a good job both for us has been a challenge."

"Before i received the transfer i had no hope that some day i will own a good house because i had no reliable source of money, but now with givedirectly my life has changed because i will have one of good houses in the village"

"I spent my transfer on buying 7 bags of maize, 4 bags of cement, kitchen utensils, build a new kitchen and saved some money for other uses in future"