Diarist 17

Diarist 17 in the year to July 2025:
Status: wife, mother, grandmother, household manager Household size: 3 (she, husband, son)
Occupation: vegetable seller. Education: none
Major assets: village house and homestead plot and very small vegetable plot
Net income year to Jul 2025: 125,445 taka (USD 1,045 PPP$ 3,904, or PPP$ 3.57 per day per person): Income in kind: 30 taka per day approx
End Sep 2024 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 14,259 taka, Loans 9,737
main worry about her family, May 2025: my son: he is lazy and maybe taking drugs

Diarist 17 was brought up in a poor but loving family, though she never went to school. When she was 14 there was a plan to marry her to someone from Tangail District. But he demanded a large dowry, and while the family was thinking this over, a local, much older man stepped in and she ended up marrying him (he too subsequently demanded a dowry, and Diarist 17's father had to sell land to pay for it). He does odd jobs, selling vegetables on the street, fishing, looking after a few banana tress on a sandy plot they have near the river. But he is not energetic (the neighbours flatly describe him as lazy) and their son looked to be turning out that way too, but seems recently to have improved. They also have two daughters, one married many years ago and the other in 2023, and Diarist 17 is now a grandmother (pictured). She is the manager of the household, organising her husband's work for him and looking after the money. She is very pious (they are Hindus) and very anxious.

The children are educated past primary level. The son has worked on-and-off as a sanitary engineer, and the younger daughter as a tutor: he has contributed from his earnings 450,000 taka over the years, accelerating in more recent times (he doesn't share all of his earnings with his family, but keeps back some pocket money for himself alone), and she has earned 105,000 up to the time she stopped for her marriage. The total gross income for the whole household was 1.3 million taka.

Diarist 17 was one of the subjects of our 'Life Day-by-Day' series which you can find here. It shows the work involved in cow rearing, which has recently become a main earner for the family (chart 01).

Diarist 17 and grandchild

Gifts

In chart 01 the frequent negative monthly balance figures hint at the need for help, and quite a lot of it comes from gifts. These are almost exclusively from family - her father and her married daughter. We recorded 73 gifts from her father (a fisherman), totaling 30,000, and 60 from her married daughter (who is married to a businessman) totaling 185,000 taka. These gifts are either for family and religious use, for example to do with health, or for attending religious events, or to help with timely repayments of MFI loans. When Diarist 17 wanted to make a gift to her grandchild (her elder daughter's child) it was that elder daughter herself who supplied the money, as a gift to Diarist 17.

The biggest total of gifts was at the time of the younger daughter's marriage: family and neighbours chipped in, showing the sympathy that Diarist 17 attracts in the neighbourhood.

Diarist 17, chart 02, gifts

Loans

Diarist 17 has also tried using loans to help her spending needs. When we first started tracking her transactions she had loans from three MFIs, BURO, Pidim and Islami Bank, and later added three more, Shakti, Grameen Bank, and Dum Foundation. She told us she worried constantly about them, above all about making the weekly repayments on time. She confessed that she felt that she was by then (2015) simply borrowing from one MFI to repay another. In the time since then she has borrowed from MFIs three-quarters of a million taka in 22 loans. In 846 repayments, she has given 850,000 taka back to them (including interest) almost all on time.

She has also taken 411,000 taka in 91 informal loans of various kinds - most of them interest-free howlats. Many are small and are used to keep MFI repayments timely. But there were some big ones: she took two howlats each of 100,000 taka for the 2023 marriage (promising one lender she would sell a cow to repay him). In 2017 her son was arrested for narcotics use and she had to get money in a hurry to bribe the police to lay off, so she took a moneylender loan of 20,000 taka, and paid 400 taka a week interest until it was repaid. Her husband was of no help in this - it was her father who negotiated with the moneylender for her. She is also a member of a local savings group (a ghoreya samity) and has borrowed as well as saved there.

She has also given loans, to her brother and to a neighbour, in 2006-07, and got repaid OK.

Like many of our Diarists, her appetite for MFI loans diminished in the aftermath of COVID. She now has only 9,000 of loans from two MFIs, compared with, for example, 120,000 from five MFIs in late 2019.

Diarist 17, chart 03, loans

Savings

Her loan accounts at MFIs have obliged her to make compulsory savings with them (all MFIs have this rule). As a result, she has virtually no savings elsewhere (except for the very little in the ghoreya samity and cash in the home). She doesn't use a moneyguard, perhaps because she has a devoted married daughter and father who give her money when needed, and she never joined the Coop. At the MFIs she hasn't used their long-term savings plan, like Grameen's GPS. The only big transactions are for short-term storage, as we see in chart 04: she held the gift from her daughter in an MFI until she gave it to her grandchild, and put the proceeds of a cow sale in an MFI and soon withdrew it to do home repairs.

Her anxiety about the MFIs has caused her interactions with them to be erratic. For example, in 2015 she withdrew all her savings from Pidim in order to make their loan repayment and as a consequence had to close the account. Later the same year she rejoined Pidim, making an initial 2,000 taka savings. In September 2016 she again paid her loan off out of savings and had to close the account, but in July the next year she again approached the loan officer and reopened an account, again with a 2,000 taka deposit. Her mother also has an account at Pidim which has a similar colourful history.

All in all, we recorded her making 869 deposits, totaling 163,000 taka. She made just 27 withdrawals, totaling 152,000.

Diarist 17, chart 04, savings

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