Diarist 58

Diarist 58 in the year to July 2025:
Status: wife, mother, household manager Household size: 4 (she, husband, 2 sons)
Occupation: masonry, shoemaking, labour, mechanic Education: almost none (husband also none)
Major assets: none
Net income year to Jul 2025: 480,970 taka (USD 4,008 PPP$ 14,969, or PPP$ 10.25 per day per person): Income in kind: none
End Sep 2024 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 256,216 taka, Loans 13,999
main worry about her family, May 2025: our land and house tenure is in dispute and is not secure

When we started with them in 2017 Diarist 58 was working in a garments factory close to her home, and her husband, a cobbler, was based in Dhaka, visiting occasionally and supporting the family, which included two sons and a daughter. That had been the case for about 20 years. The elder son was doing a BA course at a local college, the second son was a trainee at a motor garage, and the daughter was in class seven.

Diarist 58 is from our area but her husband is from a northern District and they lived there briefly at the start of their marriage, but moved south looking for better work opportunities. Her husband reached class 4 in school but Diarist 58 can only just write her name. They had a claim on land in the village, and in our area they have a couple of rooms on land belonging to her brothers - she feels secure there despite being 'okriet' - a term for living rent-free on someone else's land..

In late 2017, though, Diarist 58 lost her garments job because of her poor eyesight. She turned to construction work as a mason's helper and has been doing that ever since, now earning about 7,000 taka a month. In 2018 her husband was in trouble with the police in Dhaka for using marijuana and had to bribe them heavily. He retreated back to our area, doing various jobs as well as a bit of shoe repair. Finally he got a more regular job as a gardener and cleaner at a local technical college, and is still dong that, at 8,000 taka a month..

In 2019 her husband sold a very small part of the land back in the village and then in late 2024 , when his parents died and the land was distributed among the children, they decided they were not interested in owning village land, and sold it. It was by far the biggest transaction we have seen them make. They may use the money to buy land locally, they say, to avoid the stigma of being okreit : this despite the fact they had spent money in 2023 on improvements to their rooms on her brothers' land.

The land sale enabled them to pay dowry to the boy whom their daughter had secretly married in mid 2021. Diarist 58's husband was very upset by this marriage and refused to visit his daughter when she had a child in a hospital. Diarist 58 is trying to restore relations. Meanwhile the older son had developed asthma and in mid 2023 was in India for treatment: he is continuing as a student while working part-time at a chemical factory. The younger son is a motor mechanic at a local garage.

Chart 01 shows how, with this mix of incomes, they have managed a surplus most months.

Diarist 58, chart 01, balance

Gifts

We did not record them receiving any gifts. They paid a dowry to the daughter's husband's family in stages, completing it at the time of the land sale. Earlier, they had made a gift to a niece on her marriage.

Diarist 58, chart 02, gifts

Loans

They used MFI loans (from Grameen Bank, where she has been a long-time account holder) and howlats (interest-free local loans), mostly to manage cash flow and occasionally for bigger expenditures. We can see examples of the latter in chart 03, with Grameen loans for the dowry, and mixes of Grameen loans and local howlats for college fees, house repairs, and medical costs for the son. At Grameen Bank loans are for a year, but a borrower may 'top them up' at six-month intervals, and Diarist 58 has found this helpful. Some of the unmarked loans in the chart are Grameen loans of this sort, some are howlats, and a few are from the Co-op.

She has normally repaid howlats after a short interval (July 2018 repayment for a March 2018 howlat, December 2019 for an August 2019 howlat) . The MFI loans are mostly repaid in small weekly instalments, though when cash is available she has made a few bigger ones. They have been able to keep their borrowing under control.

Diarist 58, chart 03, loans

Savings

When we started with Diarist 58 she had MFI accounts at MFIs Grameen Bank and Pidim. In both cases she saved into the general savings account but in Grameen she also had the longer-term GPS accumulating saving plan into which she was saving 200 taka a month. But she couldn't sustain it to full term, and broke it in 2022, losing much of the interest benefit. She consoled herself by buying jewelry. She now saves 125 taka weekly into an ordinary savings account at Grameen. She closed the Pidim account in late 2017. She has held an account at the Co-op since 2021 and has her Diary project participation reward paid into it: she has withdrawn small sums from that account three times so far.

We saw, above, how she takes MFI Grameen loans at six-monthly intervals. Occasionally, if she doesn't have an immediate need for the money, she redeposits some or all of it at Grameen, as in September 2020. She is aware that this is not very cost-effective, but like Diarist 02, she likes the idea of having reserves to call on.

Diarist 58, chart 04, savings

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