Diarist 05

Diarist 05 in the year to July 2025:
Status: wife, household manager. Household size: 2 (she and husband)
Occupation: tea and snack stall owner/managers. Education: can read and write
Major assets: house/shop and homestead plot
Net income year to Jul 2025: 15,784 taka (USD 132, PPP$ 491, or PPP$ 0.67 per day per person): Income in kind: none
End Sep 2024 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 2,209 taka, Loans 0
main worry about her family, May 2025: her disabled husband's health

Diarists 05 and 03 have some similarities. They are the only two Diarists to whom the project has ever lent money, and for a similar reason - to help them escape from multiple indebtedness to MFIs. Diarist 05 is also a shopkeeper, and MFIs like to lend to shopkeepers whom they see as safe bets because it's not easy for them to run away and they have stock which the loan officers can view as loan collateral. And they're usually easy to reach.

Of the first ten Diarists we recruited three were shopkeepers, and these two - 03 and 05 - have had MFI debt problems. The story of the third, Diarist 07, is quite different, as we'll see when we reach his page.

Again like Diarist 03, Diarist 05 has two daughters, both of whom have trained as nurses. The picture, from 2016, shows 05 with one of the daughters, in their living room behind their shop. The tiny tea-and-snacks shop stands in a very small market on a road leading north out of Kapasia. Her husband, who is partly paralyzed, can be seen in the picture at the foot of the Current Status page, standing outside the shop.

Diarist 05, chart 1: her primary balance

Diarist 5, chart 2: gross shop income

The garments factory

In the early 1990s Diarist 05, who was raised in a very poor home, got a job in a factory in the ready-made garments industry, which was then emerging in Dhaka. It quickly led to trouble: an older co-worker took a fancy to her and persuaded her parents to let him marry her. She quickly found out that he was already married. She fled and divorce followed. She spent a fruitless year in a village and then took another Dhaka garments job. This time she met and married, of her own will, her present husband, a driver for a Dhaka-based woman Doctor. He was a Hindu but agreed to convert to Islam, Diarist 05's religion.

She left the factory and settled down as a housewife and mother but in 2001 her husband fell ill and was partly paralyzed. He had to stop driving, but his Doctor employer was sympathetic and has since helped the couple in various ways. The couple came to 05's home village, borrowed, and bought a scrap of land from her cousin, where the shop, which doubles as their home, now stands. It is their only notable asset.

Getting and spending

The shop is in a tiny market on a minor road, and the couple had little experience of running a business. It rarely grossed more than 7,000 taka a month, out of which they paid for stock, leaving them with very little to raise two girls, to whom they wanted to give a good education. By the time we started tracking them in 2015, they were in an MFI loan-trap, like Diarist 03 (see chart 4 below). They began to let the shop run down until Covid dealt it a severe blow in 2020 (see chart 2 above) from which it never recovered. Diarist 05 took other occasional work - some domestic service, some cooking for workmen on construction projects. By 2017 the younger daughter was already contributing some earnings from nursing, and her husband became eligible for small disability and old-age government welfare payments. They recycle and sell charcoal from the wood-stove they use to heat water for the hot tea they sell.

Their household spending, (that is, ignoring shop stock purchases and loan servicing), is made up almost entirely of food and education costs for the daughters, followed by fuel, utilities and healthcare. Her husband needs a lot of medicine, and they had a crisis in 2016 when one of their daughters had sudden-onset appendicitis and they had to scramble to get money together quickly to pay for an operation. There is no room in their budget for entertainment or holidays.

Over the years we have been following them, they have received gifts and taken loans amounting, between them, to 125% of their net earned income. Our next charts explore where these gifts and loans came from and how they have been used. We'll also take a look at her savings.

Diarist 05, chart 3, gifts received and given, business costs and household spending

Diarist 05 has rarely given gifts, and none of any great value. But she has received a lot, and we note four main occasions in this chart.

In every case, her husband's former employer, a Doctor, came forward, but also in every case a wide variety of other neighbours and family contributed, sometimes very quickly, as with the emergency appendicitis operation.

The household's biggest ever outlay - fees for getting the elder daughter into nursing college - was managed without gifts, as we shall see below (chart 5).

Diarist 05, chart 4, loans taken and repaid, business costs and household spending

When we first met her Diarist 05 had loans outstanding at 4 major MFIs - Grameen, BRAC, CSS and BURO, and added more within the year. But by this time she had fallen into the same trap as 03, and was merely borrowing from one MFI to pay off others.

After the diary project awarded her a 'rescue' loan in 2016, with which she paid off her MFI debts, she has not borrowed from MFIs.

She has continued to borrow 'howlats' (informal interest-free loans) from neighbours.

She has not been as quick as 03 to repay the project loan, but is likely to do so eventually.

Diarist 05, chart 5, savings deposited and withdrawn, business costs and household spending.

When Diarist 05 closed her MFI accounts, the savings were mostly used to offset the loan debt.

But there was an exception. At Grameen Bank she had an accumulating deposit account (a 'GPS') into which she had been paying 200 taka a month.

She could maintain that account without being a Grameen Bank borrower, so she did, eventually taking it to pay for the elder daughter to enter a high-quality nursing school in late 2023.

She has since opened a fresh GPS and still saves 200 a month (too little to show up clearly in our chart).

They also had an insurance policy dating back to when her husband was employed.

on to Diarist 07

back to Diarist 03

back to Data page