Diarist 59

Diarist 59 in the year to July 2025:
Status: wife, mother, household manager Household size: 3 (she, husband, son)
Occupation: dressmaking Education: completed primary school (husband reached class 8)
Major assets: home on homestead land, sewing machine
Net income year to Jul 2025: 76,135 taka (USD 634 PPP$ 2,370, or PPP$ 2.16 per day per person): Income in kind: about 10,000 in the year from consumption of own produce
End Sep 2024 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 827taka, Loans 17,720
main worry about her family, May 2025: it is too expensive to treat my husband's ill health properly

Diarist 59 and her husband are descendants of a family from the hills above Chittagong, and belong to an indigenous non-Bengali group, but were born in our area. They have been Hindus for several generations. When they married they lived in his village, Sripur, but found it lawless and not a good place to raise children, of which they have four - three daughters and a son. They bought a small piece of homestead land from her brother, in a rural spot behind the market where Diarist 05 has her shop, and have a traditional mud-walled house on it. The two older daughters were already married when we started with Diarist 59, but the 3rd was at home and doing a BA at the local college, helping to pay her way by some tutoring for local schoolchildren. The son was in class 8. The couple themselves are educated - he reached class 8 and she class 5.

Her husband is a tailor, renting a small shop on the roadside in the market where he makes and sells clothes. She helps him, and runs the home. When things are quiet he works for local farmers. The government offered them the chance to register as 'adivasis' ('original inhabitants') and it was suggested they might get some government help. They registered, but the help hasn't appeared, except that they were given a musical instrument.

In mid 2019 the house was connected to the mains electricity (though supply is still erratic). In the Covid lockdown the next year they made the clothes at home. In 2021 the daughter lost 10,000 taka in an internet scam related to scholarship money. Then in 2022 they start preparing for the daughter's marriage, which took place in March. The son-in-law has an office job in Dhaka and lives there while his wife lives with his parents and works in a kindergarten. In 2023 Diarist 59 bought a laptop computer for her son, who is studying computer science.

As chart 01 shows, on the income side things have been pretty steady across the years, declining somewhat after the daughter left home. They have had no serious setbacks in the period, aside from a brief lull in April 2020 caused by Covid, so there main outgoings have been discretionary ones - home improvements and the like. They have been blessed with good health except that her husband was ill in September 2023 (causing another income dip).

Diarist 59's daughter tutoring on their
veranda, 2017

Diarist 59, chart 01, balance

Gifts

When the 3rd daughter married there were gifts from neighbours. Otherwise, gift-taking was from family. Chart 02 shows how the daughters and their husbands were supportive, especially after the 3rd daughter left home.
As for gift-giving, there was little of it and what there was was directed at the local temple.

Diarist 59, chart 02, gifts

Loans

Diarist 59 has borrowed from a formal bank (BKB, the agricultural bank, using their homestead land as collateral), from four MFIs (Grameen Bank, GUK, ASA and BRAC) and has taken several howlats (interest-free local loans).

She took bank loans from BKB twice, once for the daughter's wedding costs, and once for the son's laptop. BKB loans are usually repaid at the end of a farming season, and are sometimes extended. In this case, the March 2022 loan for the wedding was mostly repaid out of the August 2023 loan for the laptop. That second loan is not yet due for repayment.

Among the MFIs her most consistent lender has been Grameen Bank. Like other Diarists, she often 'tops up' the annual loans there meaning she gets fresh capital each half year. There has been a variety of uses of these loans. None went directly into a business (the use preferred by Grameen). Instead they were used for repaying howlats, education, the laptop. the wedding, and for repaying casual shop credit. Of two GUK loans one went into the tailoring business, for buying material, the other into her household expenditure stream.

There was only one big howlat (35,000 taka in September 2024) from the second son-in-law and used for the pump. Fifteen other howlats were much smaller.

Repayment has been consistent, as chart 03 shows. Mostly it consists of regular weekly payments to the MFIs, with occasional bigger sums for the Bank and for howlats.

Diarist 59, chart 03, loans

Savings

The savings we have recorded Diarist 59 making have been entirely with MFIs. In the case of MFI ASA she closed the account in 2018 after quarrelling with them about a loan they refused to give her. Her engagement with MFI BRAC was brief. But at MFI Grameen Bank and at MFI GUK she tried saving into the longer-term cumulative DPS (or GPS) plans, but without success: she found the deposits hard to find and gave up after a few months. In the case of GUK she eventually closed her account and used the proceeds to pay off a loan she had there. In the case of Grameen she stopped making the long-term GPS deposits but has not withdrawn what she had deposited. She has done better with the regular weekly savings account at Grameen, where over the years she has saved 26,000 taka and has taken much of it out in small amounts to cover household spending. Overall they have run their savings down and now hold only a small balance, at MFI Gramen Bank.

Diarist 59, chart 04, savings

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