Diarist 51

Diarist 51 in 2025:
Status: sister, aunt, orphan, household manager Household size: 4 (she, widowed sister, sister's 2 children
Occupation: brick breaker Education: none (sister also none)
Major assets: rebuilt home
Net income 2025: 112,735 taka (USD 932 PPP$ 3,523, or PPP$ 2.41 per day per person): Income in kind: none
End Sep 2025 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 49,000 taka, Loans 0
main worry about her family, May 2025: I can't complete my home reconstruction because of lack of funds

Diarist 51 is the first of a newer group of 19 Diarists. They all started in July 2017, after we began to get support from a new donor, UNCDF.
Some of the Diarist selections were made in line with suggestions from UNCDF. Diarists 66 and 67, for example, were selected because they feature young people who managed to study while working and caring for their parents and siblings.

This is a household of two sisters who lost their parents many years ago. The older sister has two children but was widowed in 2016. The younger, unmarried, sister is our Diarist 51 and at first she was earning for the four of them, mostly brickbreaking or other casual labouring jobs like mud-road repair, while her sister looked after their home and the children. Then the sister got a job in a snack shop, at 200 taka a day then and now after swapping shops and time elapsing, 300 taka.

They have no assets. Their family is supportive: one brother, a fish trader, gives almost daily. The neighbours like the two women. The sister gets a government disability allowance for poor vision caused by a defect in one eye.

They have no home of their own but live in a house on land now owned by a brother after inheriting it. When we started, the MFI Grameen Bank was using the house as a meeting room for one of its men's groups: the group met sparsely and irregularly so it was no great inconvenience. Then Grameen Bank pulled out and the two sisters, with the help of new income from the older sister's shop work and savings (see later), rebuilt the crumbling old room in 2023.

Chart 01 shows how on a monthly basis they were often in deficit and how the disability allowance was an important (though not the only) resource for dealing with that.

Diarist 51, chart 01, balance

Gifts

The extent of family support is revealed in the gifts they receive, as shown in chart 02. A third, older sister, married and living with her husband, is a frequent giver of cash. A brother who trades fish gives 20 taka almost everyday to ensure that the children get milk to drink. Altogether, in the almost 8 years up to end December 2024, they received 61,215 taka from no less than 3,892 gifts, 1,839 of them from the brother. This is a useful addition to their small income.

The two sisters, who are Hindu, give occasionally to the temple community and its priest.

Diarist 51, chart 02, gifts

Loans

The two sisters, in the time we have tracked them, made only one deal with a formal loan provider when Diarist 51's sister went to the MFI Grameen Bank to get a loan for the home repairs (to the old Grameen meeting house). She took 30,000 taka and repaid regularly in 44 weekly payments of 750 each (the interest on such loans is calculated 'flat' at 10% of the loan value, effectively around 22% or 23% at an annual rate because the loan principle declines).

For Grameen Bank 30,000 taka was a small loan: these days MFIs are happy to take on even poor loan clients quickly, without much due process, and give them a modest loan.

Other than that, we recorded them taking just 4 howlats (interest-free loans) from family: one was repaid quickly, the others not: they may get repaid, or the family members who gave them may be content to let them become, effectively, gifts.

Diarist 51, chart 03, loans

Savings

The two women mixed informal and formal ways to save. They used their elder sister as a moneyguard and we saw them make one small withdrawal from that source, early on. Later, at the time of home rebuilding, an older episode of moneyguard saving came to light. Before his death, Diarist 51's sister's husband had been saving money regularly with his wife's older sister (the same person just referred to as a moneyguard who also gave them gifts). That sister suggested she give back that money for the home building - a substantial 100,000 taka.

In mid 2019 Diarist 51 herself decided to open a life insurance policy, with the aim of protecting the futures of her nephew and niece. She has been paying 7,000 taka a year (she made her 2024 payment late, in mid-April 2025).

Then, when the sister opened her MFI Grameen Bank account to get a loan for the building work, they decided to open a cumulative 'GPS' (Deposit Pension) plan at 1,000 a month for ten years. Unfortunately they found that too much (they were also repaying the loan, of course) and they stopped depositing after ten monthly payments. But they decided to leave that money in Grameen Bank and it remained there , along with the weekly 'ordinary savings' that the sister has also been making at Grameen Bank, for several years. But in late 2025, finding it hard to maintain the deposits in the face of fierce inflation, they broke the GPS, but left a smaller balance in Grameen.

Diarist 51, chart 04, savings

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