"The biggest hardship I have faced is that I work very long hours to meet the target in the farms because I am old and my work rate is slow. Sometimes I spend two days working on a job that would take young strong men just few hours. I end up many times going without meals because of lack of money either because I did not meet the target of the farm owners or promised pay for the following day."

"As a casual labourer, I earn between 4000 and 5000 shillings in a good month. This money is never enough to meet all of my family's needs of food, education, clothing and medical care incase of illnesses. Due to these constraints, I have even failed to build a house big enough to accommodate my whole family, we are all squeezed in a one room house that is made of mud walls and an iron sheet roof that leaks during rainy seasons. I see inadequate financial resources as my biggest hardship in life."

"My husband depends on charcoal burning to make ends meet but the work is tiresome and takes 3 to 4 months to get returns. During this period of waiting, I would rely on my two daughters who lived with me for food and other basic needs such as medication as they both did casual jobs to earn income for the family. Unfortunately, they both passed away a few years back and this devastated me alot. Inadequate financial resources has been and still is my biggest setback in life. "

"I expect my life to have changed in the next six months in that, I will have cleared my college studies. And also I will have saved some good money in the merry go round which I intend to use in starting up a poultry keeping project to enable me to earn an extra income to meet additional household needs."

"It was 5:00 am when I had a message notification on my phone and when I checked, it was a message from GiveDirectly. I felt so happy, shared the news with the spouse, and she was happy too and the only word she uttered was "all I need is a good house, kindly plan on how to construct it"."

"My phone had run out of power so it was off the whole night. The moment I switched it on in the morning I was happy to receive a confirmation message that I had received money from GiveDirectly. I showed my spouse the message, he was happy too, and we celebrated together. Having lost all the household through the fire that caught our house we had a lot to do and receiving the money was meant a new chapter in our life."

"Subsistence farming is quite unreliable due to poor rainfall and unproductive land in the area. However, this is the source of income I depend on to take care of my family. Besides this, my husband works in a quarry and supports the family with less 1000 shillings a month. The lack of a stable source of income makes it impossible to feed and educate my children. I am required to pay 3000 shillings for my children in school, but I am unable to raise this amount and in most cases they are sent back home. My desire is to give my children a bright future through education. Therefore, I will use this transfer to revive my shop business that will generate a stable income for the family. I will also construct a new house for my mother in-law since the current one is very small and the roof is leaking. Besides this, I will purchase oxen to facilitate agriculture which will curb food shortage. Apart from using the oxen in my farm, I will also rent them to other people in order to generate more income."

"We solely depend on my husband's income as a family. Unfortunately, his income is very low and this at times cannot sustain our family in terms of basic needs like food. "

"The money I received my first cash transfer, I felt excited because my plan of completing the construction of my permanent house had come to fulfilment."

"The moment I received my first cash transfer, I felt happy because I have been sleeping in a grass thatched house that is in a sorry state but now I will build a permenent house that will improve on my living standards."