"The biggest difference in my daily life is that I now have a pair of oxen. Initially, I used to hire from friends which were quite expensive and sometimes I could not afford it. Whenever I did not have enough money for labour, I was forced to dig my own farm and this meant that I would only dig and plant a small section of my farm and leave the rest to idle. Currently I am a happy farmer because I can now plough my farm in good time and I have also been able to save the expenses of hiring labour. I am positive that I would have a good harvest over the coming seasons because I am now in a position to utilize my whole farm."

"It was around six in the morning when I was preparing myself for my daily hustle. Then I heard my phone ringing continuously, upon checking, I realized it was an Mpesa message from GiveDirectly. I was overexcited because I definitely knew that I would accomplish most of my long time dreams."

"Failure to meet my inner desire of owning a piece of land and providing quality education to my children due to financial instability has been my biggest hardship I am facing in my life.I depend on food vending a temporary job. The income I get from this activity is 2 dollars per day which are hardly enough to feed my family of 8 members and to take care of other needs like education. I am constantly afraid that I may fail to provide for my family something that has carried off my joy."

"I'm planning to use 450 dollars to construct a three bedroom house for my family. Furthermore, I'll use 300 dollars to buy two indeginous dairy cows for the purpose of getting milk both for domestic consumption and for sell."

"My biggest hardship is the vicious cycle of poverty that we have experienced for the better part of our lives. Ever since I was born I have been through ups and downs. Sometimes I had to sleep for 3 days without food and this is the main reason why I drop out of primary school, class 6 in order to seek employment in Nakuru County where I was looking after cattle."

"The biggest hardship in my life is lack of a descent and a spacious house for my children. My house isn't enough for all my children to be hosted."

"The biggest hardship I have faced in my life is food insecurity. I have been unable to sustain a steady supply of food to my family."

"I quit my family at my tender age to get married. I thought I had made in life until I had to realize that I was to stand up for my family. It was unfortunate that I had gone to another humble family but that never bacame an issue, the regular fights and wrangles in my young family over our daily responsibility became my worst heartbreaking experience ever faced in my life. It was hard for us to managing enough the scare resources to feed our family."

"My business of selling take-away foodstuffs has been faced with a lot of challenges since the working site is small and I usually serve most of the customers outside or in some cases under tree shades. I have desired to construct a spacious working site for my business but this has never been easy for me due to financial instability and I am always worried that most of the potential customers may disappear. Once I heard the arrival of GiveDirectly to our village, the hope of upscaling my business got awakened and I am so happy to know that, soon I will have the opportunity to achieve my goals. To ensure this is accomplished, I plan to spend utmost $200 to construct the room and again an amount of $200 will add to my capital and this will mean a new dawn for my business, eventually more profit out of it. For the remaining amount, I will spend $500 to buy a piece of land to have a place of farming since, at the moment, I usually lease from my neighbor during planting seasons. With all this done, I am sure of living the life of my dream, hence, this is basically what receiving this money means to me."

"As a family we primarily depend on subsistence farming to meet our both daily and future goals. In our home area, hiring man power and farm machinery is so expensive. This so demoralizing and straining for small scale farmers like me. To me receiving this money means a steady income and better farm produce. I am planning to invest part of it to buy oxen that will greatly help me in my farm and also will hire out to source in an extra income."