Diarist 56

Diarist 56 in the year to March 2026:
Status: widow, mother, household manager Household size: 1 (she)
Occupation: casual domestic & shop labour Education: none
Major assets: two-room timber-framed home on homestead land
Net income in the year to March 2026: 21,115 taka (USD 175 PPP$ 660, or PPP$ 1.81 per day per person): Income in kind: none
End Sep 2025 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 39,727 taka, Loans 0
main worry about her family, May 2025: not being able to afford proper medical treatment

Diarist 56 is from a northern District but has been here most of her adult life. She was widowed some 35 years ago. Her husband had been a day labourer, and they had 3 daughters and a son, but the son disappeared, mysteriously, when he was about 7. She thinks that a body found a decade back may have been his. The three daughters married: one is now divorced and the other two, one of whom converted from Hindu to Muslim on marriage, live with their husbands. Diarist 56 lives on her own, in a home on land she owns.

Since her husband died she has been working at a turmeric and chili-grinding mill. When the frequent power cuts close the mill, she helps in a shop. In the Covid lockdowns in 2020 the mill was closed and it was hard to get alternative work: she hunted for relief payments and got a little. There were other quiet times as far as transactions are concerned when in 2021 and again in 2022-2025 she spent time with her daughter in Dhaka, who covered most of her costs. Then in late 2023 she was sick and was in hospital for a short spell.

As chart 01 suggests, she neither earns nor spends much money. In the case of Diarist 01 we saw how a very low income meant that the participation reward payments from our Project represented a significant percentage of her income. In the case of Diarist 56, it is welfare payments. She is eligible for both an old-age allowance and a widow's allowance (Diarist 01 is not). These are responsible for the peaks in her income in the chart. The frequency of these payments has varied but has in general become more frequent and more reliable as time has passed.

On the expenditure side, her biggest shock was the loss of 7,000 taka, stolen from a box in her room when she was out in September 2017. After that, stocking up on rice, and buying over-the-counter medicines have been her biggest outgoings.

Diarist 56 at work

Diarist 56, chart 01, balance

Gifts

Diarist 56 is close to her family, especially her second daughter, and has received many small gifts from them. We recorded 93 gifts received totaling 34,000 taka, to the close of 2024, all but a handful from family. The single biggest was a gift of 5,000 from her second daughter's husband, thanking her for lending him 35,000 taka interest free two years earlier: it came along with full repayment of the loan.

Her own gifts to others comprise small ones to family and to the temple community.

Diarist 56, chart 02, gifts

Loans

Diarist 56 does not have accounts at MFIs and has never taken or given a loan on interest. Every one of the 28 loans she has given (worth 75,700 taka altogether) has been a howlat - an interest free loan. We recorded four big examples. She lent 35,000 taka to her second daughter's husband for business, repaid two years later (as we saw, with a gift attached). She lent 22,000 to her 2nd daughter when that daughter's mother-in-law died. It was quickly repaid, as was a smaller loan of 10,000 a little later. Finally in March 2025 she lent to help her grandson (her older daughter's son) pay a migration agent to get him a job overseas. The remaining loans were small.

She has taken small howlats - never more than 1,200 taka and usually much smaller - to allow her to overcome very short-term cash shortages. She takes them from her employer at the mill, her daughters, and from neighbours. Most are quickly repaid.

Diarist 56, chart 03, loans

Savings

So, where does she get the money for the loans she gives? She has always been a good saver, despite her small income. We know she saves at home, because we recorded the 7,000 taka that was stolen. But she has two other savings vehicles. One is a ghoreya samity, a savings club often described as an ASCA (an Accumulating Saving and Credit Association). This is a group of neighbours (often women) who save together, daily or weekly, lend the money out among themselves, at interest, and then, annually, close the books and return the savings along with profits from the lending. The annual closing helps keep the club free of corruption and ghoreyas in Bangladesh have a good reputation for reliability. There are several running in our area.

Diarist 56 did not borrow from her ghoreya, she used it to save, most days at 10 taka a day, or more if she had missed a few days. There were annual closings in the Aprils of 2018, 2019 and 2020, from which she received 4,010 taka, 3,970 taka and 3,630 taka respectively. Mostly, she then stored that cash at home to cover ordinary outgoings. She lost confidence in the ghoreya in 2021 after a member failed to repay her loan in full., and left. It is, however, still running.

Meanwhile, she had a savings account at the nearby Co-operative, which offers a daily savings collection service. Like Diarist 01, she put her Project participation reward cash into this account, and gradually started using it more broadly. She would store her welfare payments there. It became her account of choice for the howlat lending she did. In all, in the seven and a half years to the end of 2024 she has deposited 118,650 taka and withdrawn 156,387 taka, the difference being accounted for partly by interest earnings but mainly by deposits made before we started tracking her.

In chart 04, you can plot the bigger transactions against the howlat transactions shown in chart 03.

Diarist 56, chart 04, savings

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