Diarist 11

Diarist 11 in the year to July 2025:
Status: widow, mother, grand-mother, household manager Household size: 5 (she, son, daughter-in-law, two grand-children)
Occupation: (former shopkeeper), son is assistant in another shop, plays band. Education: none
Major assets: house and homestead plot
Net income year to Jul 2025: 89,190 taka (USD 743 PPP$ 2,776, or PPP$ 1.52 per day per person): Income in kind: none
End Sep 2024 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 3,081 taka, Loans 0
main worry about her family, May 2025: the health and income preospects of the next generation

Diarist 11: the shop

This is the story of a family-run shop. - so it can be compared with Diarists 03, 05 and 07. In this case it was a tiny shop - just a cupboard sized room with a grille onto a dirt path to serve customers - but it was the only general store of its kind in the Hindu settlement of Hrishipara. So Diarist 11 kept it going and as we can see from chart 01, for the first three years sales created a surplus for them most months.

But then in 2018 he died, and his wife took over the shop and became our Diarist 11. Business slowed, and then Covid dealt it a nasty blow. She struggled, and tried to revive the shop several times. But in early 2022 she closed the shop for good.

Hers is a multi-generation family, with a son and his wife and 3 children. and from the start some income came in from the son's day labour. which he mixed with a bit of shop labour, masonry and playing in the village band (with Diarist 02). The son's wife pitched in with some dressmaking and some brick breaking. These ancillary occupations became their mainstay in more recent years. But things are not easy. By 2025 they were in further decline: she was in poor health and her granddaughter married without family approval, and ran off. The household size fell by one.

Diarist 11, chart 01: primary balance

Like Diarist 03 and 05, Diarist 11 used multiple MFI loans during the time that the husband ran the shop. We tracked them taking loans from five MFIs, using the accounts of the wife and the daughter-in-law. So many large loans could not be fully used for shop stock purchases, and were used in other ways, perhaps sometime wastefully. As chart 02 suggests, sometimes the loans were 'rolled over' (repaid out the proceeds of a subsequent loan) and sometimes used to repay a loan from another MFI. They were a source of anxiety. Diarist 11 repaid the loans, so the MFIs made their profit, and sometimes the MFIs were generous, for example when they forgave the loans that were outstanding on the death of the main breadwinner.

When the wife took over the shop, she stopped taking MFI loans and moved to smaller more occasional ones from the nearby cooperative, where they had always saved. She also took interest-free howlats from local people, most of them too small to show up well in the chart.

Diarist 11: chart 02: loans

Diarist 11, chart 03, savings

Although savings did not play a big role in their household management, Diarist 11's family were, like most of our Diarists, consistent savers. They saved small amounts daily into the Cooperative (which offers a daily collection service) and weekly amounts of compulsory savings into their various MFI accounts.

The one big flow shown in chart 03 came about when they took a MFI loan and stored it briefly in the Cooperative, then almost immediately retrieved it for use in home rebuilding.

Diarist 11, chart 04, gifts

They did not give nor take many gifts. But chart 04 records a common occurrence in this community, when local people gave quite generously to help defray the costs of the husband's funeral in 2018.

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