Diarist 65

Diarist 65 in the year to March 2026:
Status: wife, mother, household manager Household size: 3 (the couple, and a daughter (a son went abroad January 2025)
Occupation: hospital cleaner, rickshaw driving, driving Education: class 4 (husband unschooled)
Major assets: home on homestead land; rickshaw
Net income in the year to March 2026: 152,725 taka (USD 1,262 PPP$ 4,773, or PPP$ 4.36 per day per person): Income in kind: none
End Sep 2025 balances at formal FSPs: Savings 54,404 taka, Loans 54,404
main worry about her family, May 2025: debt: I have informal loans I cannot repay

Diarist 65, who was schooled up to class 4, went to work in Dubai as a maid, was sick, and returned after three months, still owing money to migration agents. She married an unschooled ferry boatman (who can also cook professionally) and they have a son who left school after class 4 and was a driver when we started with them: Diarist 65 wanted him to go abroad. There are two daughters (15 and 9 when we met them) in school, and Diarist 65's mother lived with them in an old-fashioned mud house that she wanted to rebuild because she thought it unsafe. They own the homestead land on which it sits but have a boundary dispute with her uncle who lives next door

She is a cleaner at the public hospital's ICU and emergency floor. She started as a substitute worker but has lobbied, so far unsuccessfully, to get formal employment status as a '4th Class Employee' like Diarist 27 and his wife. When we started she was earning 3,000 taka a month for a very long and arduous day, and it hasn't increased much since. She also gets occasional tips from patients. That pattern of earning - hospital work, boatman, and driver - persisted for some years. The son is not very active, and earns little or nothing: Diarist 65 got him a passport as early as 2017 though he didn't leave for many years. Meanwhile there was heavy expenditure on repairs to her husband's boat, and to their home, and she was still trying to pay off the debts from her own spell abroad. In 2021 her older daughter married, and the costs were found from borrowing and gifts as well as from income. In 2022 a granddaughter was born. Around that time the younger daughter contracted a love marriage but when the families came to register it formally the authorities declared the couple underage and they were unable to proceed. Later that year Diarist 65 had 7,000 taka stolen from her home.

Her husband, ten years her senior, gave up being a boatman. He tried driving an e-rickshaw but that was also too strenuous. Later they put money together to buy a better electric rickshaw and soon after that a replacement battery for it. But his condition worsened and in mid 2025 he had a major operation. Diarist 65 began to be paid officially and opened a formal Bank account to receive the wage. In 2024 she was busy finding money to send the son overseas: at the turn of the year to 2025 she paid out altogether 335,000 taka, raised mainly from howlats. On 26th January 2025 the son left for Saudi Arabia. But he couldn't get a job there and by the end of the year Diarist 65 was having to send him money!

Diarist 65, chart 01, balance

Gifts

We recorded three significant gifts. One came from a nephew to help with the home construction. It is not uncommon for the wider family, outside the immediate household, to see such investments as a matter for them collectively. The second was a total of 95,000 taka from the many guests who attended the daughter's marriage in 2021 and the third money collected by neighbours to help pay for her husband's operation in mid 2025.

Diarist 65, chart 02, gifts

Loans

Diarist 65 exemplifies a behaviour that we have found quite common among MFI clients. She borrows from friends and relatives on low-cost howlat terms, because she can get bigger sums, more quickly, from that source than any other. But she then refinances them with loans from MFIs - in her case mainly ASA but also Grameen Bank. These loans allow her to repay lump sums to howlat lenders and then repay the MFI conveniently slowly in conveniently small weekly or monthly instalments. The technique is very visible in chart 03. The repayments on the MFI loans can be seen in chart 03 as a steady stream of small amounts.

Later on she also benefitted from the increasing willingness of MFIs to lend quite large sums to new borrowers. The MFI Jagaroni Chakra lent her 200,000, used for migration, the operation, and repayment of howlats.

Diarist 65, chart 03, loans

Savings

Diarist 65 has used formal savings accounts mainly as temporary stores of large sums she has received. Thus, when her nephew gifted her money for rebuilding, she put it into a formal bank for a few weeks before spending it. Later, she put the proceeds of an MFI ASA loan into her account at the Co-op before taking it out and using it 2 and 4 months later. More recently, she banked the big loan from her new new MFI, Jagaroni, at the Coop.

But she also used her account at MFI ASA to save in the high-interest monthly accumulating savings plan known as a DPS (but referred to most often as a GPS because Grameen Bank pioneered it for poor people). Thus, in 2022 she withdrew from a matured plan to spend on her building work.

Diarist 65, chart 04, savings

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