Diarist 03

Diarist 03 died in June 2026. We did not transfer data-collection to anyone in her family. Therefore we leave this page unchanged since the June 2026 update.

Diarist 03 in the year to June 2026:
Status: widow. Household size: 1
Occupation: none, (retired shopkeeper) but receives remittances. Education: can read and write
Major assets: house and homestead plot, plus another very small plot of land
Net income year to June 2026: 99,020 taka (USD 818, PPP$ 3,094, or PPP$ 8.48 per day per person): Income in kind: none
End Sep 2025 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 1,415 taka, Loans 0 taka
main worry about her family, May 2025: my failing health while I still have two unmarried daughters
Diarist 03 died in June 2026

Diarist 03, unlike Diarists 01 and 02, was a Muslim, with a home a few hundred metres away from them in the local market area. She had been a widow since 2006, and had brought up five daughters, three of whom have married, and one of whom trained as a nurse and has a job in Malaysia. Diarist 03's husband was a shopkeeper and after his death she continued to run the shop, a small-scale grocery store (seen in the picture). By the time we started tracking her transactions, when she was in her early sixties, the shop was running poorly, as the first chart suggests. She told us, back then, that she thought the shop was making a profit, though she didn’t keep accounts. She got stock delivered each morning by rickshaw van and usually paid for it out of the day's takings at the day's end. She gave 'baki' (shop credit) to several customers many of whom were salaried employees of the hospital opposite. She said "you can’t run a shop without giving baki". In early 2018 she closed the shop. Her home remained the rooms she rebuilt behind the shop. That was her one big asset, though she began to spend more and more time with one of her daughters in Dhaka.

Diarist 03 had been in poor health from 2019 on, and in 2026 her conditions declined sharply. In June 2026 she died.

Diarist 03 in her shop

Diarist 03, chart 1: her primary balance

As chart 1 shows, during the three years that she was running the shop as well as raising and educating three daughters, her spending often exceeded her income.

Her handling of money contracted sharply after she closed the shop, but her 'primary balance' was still negative in many months, and remained so. Our subsequent slides will examine how she coped with this situation. We begin with loans, because they shed light on the troubled earlier years.

Diarist 03, chart 2, loans

When we started tracking Diarist 03 she already had loans outstanding from multiple MFIs (50,000 from Grameen, 20,000 from IDF, 29,000 from BASA, 30,000 from Uddipan, and maybe more - she was embarrassed to reveal all).

She had reached the stage where she was borrowing from one MFI to pay off another - as the chart shows for 2015 and early 2016.

She was in considerable distress.

We took an unorthodox approach for researchers and decided that the Diary Project should lend her enough money, interest free, to extinguish these MFI debts - that can be seen in the chart in the period from mid 2016 to mid 2017. We did it mainly because she was, as a widow, still educating her three unmarried daughters, and we didn't want to stand by and watch their futures collapse. Diarist 03 was paying off the debt to us, in small occasional instalments, until her death. She borrowed again after she closed the shop, but not from MFIs, whom she avoided. In mid 2021 she borrowed 'howlats' (interest-free loans from family and friends) to rebuild the home behind the shop: some of that money was repaid, and some turned, over time, into gifts rather than loans.

Diarist 03, chart 3: the role of remittances from Malaysia

Our third chart clearly explains the transformation in Diarist 03's fortunes.

Not long after Diarist 03 gave up the shop, and as a result of her being able to complete her third daughter's education, that daughter got a job in Malaysia as a nurse. She has been remitting cash to her mother ever since, a resource that has helped pay to complete her sisters' educations as well help pay for the home rebuilding.

Diarist 03 also took some small cash gifts, especially towards the end of her life, when she was supported by her son-in-law.

But was Diarist 03 ever a saver?

Diarist 03, chart 4: her modest savings record

Her savings were modest compared with her loan and remittance transactions.

But she always saved, most consistently when she had to make savings at MFIs in the early years, and then saving voluntarily with the local cooperative.

As at December 2025 she had about 1,500 saved at the cooperative. At her death she still owed the Project some money (about 4,000) for the 'rescue' loan we made back in 2016. That debt has been forgiven.

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