Diarist 20

Diarist 20 in year to March 2026:
Status: wife, mother, grandmother, household manager Household size: 4 (she. husband, daughter-in-law and grandson)
Occupation: sari trader, farmer. Education: none (offspring are educated)
Major assets: house and homestead plot; cows, sewing machine
Net income in year to March 2026: 233,020 taka (USD 1,926 PPP$ 7,282, or PPP$ 4.99 per day per person): Income in kind: about 30,000 in the year from farming
End Sep 2025 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 2,984 taka, Loans 0
main worry about her family, May 2025: I and my son are in poor health these days

Diarist 20

is perhaps our most entrepreneurial Diarist - vying with Diarists 16 and 27 for that position. She is uneducated, from a very poor background, and a woman. She is married and they have had three daughters (all now married) and a son. Her husband nominally looks after the cow-raising work, and the farming which they do on land leased in, but it is Diarist 20 who makes all the decisions in these areas. Her own main business has been trading in saris - buying them from wholesale markets and selling them door to door in her neighbourhood. But you wouldn't know that from the notes we have added to chart 01, because her big transactions have been to do with two other big ambitions: getting her son work overseas, and buying land to settle on her daughter. By the time Covid came along she had achieved these two goals, and that gives rise to the remarkable three-phase character of her record. Until Covid she was in high-power intensive mode, then came a couple of years of quieter activity, and then, since mid-2023, a very quiet period. These phases are strongly reflected in her financial life, particularly in her borrowing from an MFI, as we shall see in the following section.

Diarist 20, chart 01, balance

Gifts

Her gift-giving and taking has been centred on the family. She has sent money to her daughters for occasions like childbirth. for example. She has accepted gifts, mostly from sons-in-law grateful for the help she has given their wives. The sums involved have not been large.

Diarist 20, chart 02, gifts

Loans

Diarist 20 is the most skillful manipulator of MFI lending that I have come across, and she has done it using just one MFI - Grameen Bank. It is part of her entrepreneurial talent. She is a long-term 'member' of Grameen and has often served as her Grameen Centre's 'Chief'. She has formed a remarkable relationship with the loan officers and with the fellow-members of her 'Centre' (the 20 to 40 people who sit together each week to meet the loan officer). By making her weekly repayments on time and by helping out other members when they have repayment difficulties, she has been able to get the loan officers to be flexible with the MFI rules, and has been able to get many fellow-members to on-lend their loans to her. Each time Grameen introduced a new loan type, Diarist 20 would take one and persuade others to take one for her. For example, she has had many 'cow fattening loans' and used them for her migration and land-buying ambitions. In just one month in the middle of 2018 (when she was buying land) she took five loans from Grameen - in her own name, in the name of her daughter, and in the name of other members (see chart 05 below).

Hers is a text-book example of how MFI loans can be taken and used to huge advantage - providing the borrower has the needed skills.

All-in-all, we recorded her taking 55 loans over a seven-year period up to the end of 2024. 32 were from Grameen, and totalled over 1.4 million taka. The others were mostly interest-free howlats, totalling 711,000 taka, and two were interest-bearing informal loans from neighbours, of 25,000 and 100,000.

Another of Diarist 20's talents is that she knows when to stop: by the time of the Covid outbreak she had achieved her big ambitions, and soon after that she unsentimentally abandoned her high-intensity activity at Grameen Bank.

Diarist 20, chart 03, loans

Savings

Diarist 20 has used Grameen savings cleverly. Altogether in the period to the end of 2024 she has deposited over 340,000 taka. Some goes into the ordinary compulsory savings account and is often withdrawn for occasional needs. Some goes into the accounts of her 'proxy' savers (family and neighbours). She used the best of the Grameen savings plans - the 'GPS' accumulating plan - throughout the period that we have been tracking her transactions, and has so far withdrawn twice: a matured plan of 44,850 in 2018 and an immature one in 2025. The 44,850 sum arrived just in time for the land purchase in mid 2018.

She has also been a member of an informal 'ghoreya' savings-and-loan club (a 'cow samity' set up to help Muslim people save up for a sacrificial cow for the Eid Festival). The daughter saved at the Co-op as well.

Nevertheless, it is clear from charts 03 and 05 that borrowing has been much more important in her money management than savings.

Diarist 20, chart 04, savings

July 2018

We end with a closer look at July 2018, the month that Diarist 20 took five loans from single MFI.

Chart 04 shows what happened each day of the month. On the 15th, Diarist 20 'topped-up' her regular Grameen loan, taking 54,865 taka. On the same day her daughter took a 50,000 taka Grameen loan and handed it to her mother. (Her daughter was in the same Centre as Diarist 20, an infraction of Grameen rules that the loan officer was willing to overlook).

On the 30th she took 50,000 taka loans in the names of four fellow-members. She rewarded these members by paying for their compulsory weekly savings as well as making all the repayments at the weekly Centre meeting. On that day she also took an interest-free howlat from her own sister, also of 50,000.

The 15th and 30th were not regular weekly meeting days for her Grameen Centre. Loan applications are submitted at the weekly meet, but borrowers then travel to the Bank branch a few days later to pick up the money.

Below the line you can see the weekly rhythm of repayments.

Diarist 20, chart 05, loans in July 2024

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