With the wide gap in access to formal credit for MSMEs in South and East Asia, micro-businesses often borrow from unreliable sources at exorbitant rates. Based on our Corner Shop Diaries research, this blog explores how and why corner shops take loans and the sources from which they borrow.

Income plummets in Bangladesh as a result of Covid-19 – Stuart Rutherford’s Hrishipara diaries reveal, in graphic detail, the daunting scale of the challenges facing the poor worldwide.

Part of our Low Income Lives series, this blog reveals how rickshaw driver Abul from Bangladesh managed to buy a better vehicle and how it affected the economy and welfare of his household.

As part of the Hrishipara Daily Diaries Project, MSC tracked the income of a brick-breaker in Bangladesh to discover how he manages his household despite fluctuations in income that tosses his household in and out of extreme poverty.

In this blog, we highlight why the poor wish to engage in unskilled labor and petty trade by studying the records of respondents from low-income households in a “financial diary” research project in central Bangladesh.

This is the third in a series of short articles about the findings of a daily ‘financial diary’ research project. A description of the project can be found on its website.

In the first edition of MicroSave’s ‘Low-Income Lives’, Stuart Rutherford looks at education, using data from the Hrishipara Daily Financial Diaries project which records the flow of money from households in Bangladesh.  

In this edition of MicroSave’s ‘Low Income Lives’ series, Stuart Rutherford uses data from the Hrishipara Daily Financial Diaries to study how poor people in Bangladesh buy food.