Poverty knowledge and action research: Lessons from the Ramanagaram Financial Diaries

Introduction

There has been a virtual explosion of stakeholders involved in tackling the problem of poverty alleviation. Traditionally, it was the state that grappled with it on a macro scale. Today increasingly, private businesses, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), non-profits, multi-national organizations, community organizations and research foundations and think tanks, among others are staking claims in finding solutions to some of these problems. However, despite the sheer number of players, there is a strange convergence in their strategies for poverty eradication (Sen, 1999). The crux of the poverty problem, as it is called, is seen to lie in the characteristics of the poor, and therefore, the solutions call for the poor to bootstrap themselves out of poverty (O’Connor, 2001). The focus is on enabling the poor to participate in markets and not making them mere recipients of state aids and subsidies (World Bank, 2001).

We believe that one of the reasons for this ‘poverty’ of solutions to tackle the problems of the poor can be traced to the dominant methodological lens for understanding poverty. Most data about the poor (qualitative or quantitative) are collected and analyzed by and for institutions far removed from the poor and unaccountable to them (McGee, 2003). The dominant theme is to deduce generalizable hypotheses for easy comparability across time and regions (Harriss & Street, 2007). There is, however, a creeping realization in that in the quest for objectivity, most studies on poverty emerging from such research suffer from this classic bind: there is very little connection between the researcher’s thinking and the concerns and experiences of the people who are actually involved – ‘because of its quest for a particular scientific standard, poverty knowledge has been filtered not just through the experiences and cultural biases of the privileged, but through the social position of “the professors” in relation to “the poor”’ (O’Connor, 2001, p. 11). In pursuit of narrow, verifiable generalizations about the poor, research on poverty does not have the wherewithal to contend with the complex and peculiar social and political power structures in which poverty is embedded (Breman, 2008). There is very little attempt to go behind the numbers or words, so to speak.

There is no denying that data-based measures or indicators of poverty have aided our understanding of poverty. At the macro level at which policies are made and implemented, such quantitative analysis of poverty lends itself easily to generalizable findings that policy makers are on the lookout for (McGee, 2003). With increasing analytical and computing power, it is also possible to have multiple poverty indices, each far richer and multi-dimensional. There is also this realization that to get more insights into the causal processes of poverty, a more systematic incorporation of participative and qualitative approaches of poverty appraisals needs to be done (Narayan, Chambers, Shah, & Petesch, 2000).

However, these dominant methodological perspectives driving research on poverty stem from a process of data collection and analysis that is distanced and a-contextual. As a result, it can only proffer solutions that are also generic and a-contextual, centering on the characteristics, abilities or behavior of some non-specific poor. In recent studies poverty is being viewed in the wider context of ‘psychology of scarcity’; with the aim of making the discussion more sympathetic and engaging (Mullainathan & Shafir, 2013). The argument being that the experience of scarcity (be it of time, human companionship, or money) is far more overarching and all pervasive to human condition – the experience of scarcity hoping to evoke a universal psychology of its own.

To truly understand poverty, we have to find ways to bridge the gap between the researcher and the researched. And the only way to do that is to involve the poor in our understanding of the data we collect about their poverty. We therefore wanted to explore methodologies grounded in practice that could create more contextual meaning on the data being collected about the poor. In other words, in the spirit of action research, we wanted the poor to be the drivers of the data being collected and analyzed about them. Therefore, when we came across the methodology of financial diaries pioneered by Stuart Rutherford (2001) in Bangladesh, it gave us hope. From our viewpoint, the diary methodology offered us this unique advantage: we could tweak it towards ‘working’ with our participants to understand the data gathered from them, making it far more participatory. To that end, we deviated from this methodology carried out by Stuart Rutherford and others (Collins, Morduch, Rutherford, & Ruthven, 2009) that had field workers going to the houses of the participants and jotting the weekly information on household cash flows for them. We instead asked our participants to be our diary writers and gave them diaries in which they themselves (mainly, the woman in the household) wrote down the daily household cash flows. We participated in the periodic collation and triangulation of the diaries, they had jotted down for us. We conducted periodic meetings with our diary writers to disseminate this information and carry out discussions among them. It was for us, a unique journey in which we along with our diary writers were involved in understanding the daily grind of their lives.

This article is a compilation of these learnings in poverty that we, researchers at a business school in Bangalore, India, got from this project involving financial diaries kept by a group of poor women in Ramanagaram, a town 60 km away from the city of Bangalore for a period starting August 2007 to December 2009. These lessons, we believe, could only be learnt because we incorporated two crucial elements of action research into the financial diaries methodology. First, by asking our study participants to be our diary writers, we made sure that we were conducting our study with people rather than on people (Heron & Reason, 2001). Second, we decided to take it beyond what we still thought was a narrow ‘researcher-respondent’ role in this methodology. We imposed no structure on these diaries and the diary writers were given the freedom to write it the way they wanted. In the process of data collection, we used the periodic meetings not just for collating information but also for conducting conversations with our diary writers around topics emanating from their diaries. Since our diary writers lived in compact neighborhoods, they preferred that the collation of diaries be done in groups. These meetings became occasions for group discussions driven by the information written in their diaries. The agenda for these meetings got set by the entries in their diaries and therefore were decided by the diary writers themselves. By its very design, it incorporated elements of participative research and went beyond surveys, structured/unstructured interviews or group discussions, since the purpose of the meetings was to collate and understand the diary entries made by our diary writers and not the more formal ‘meetings’ for a research project.

This article will enunciate some of the key precepts of action research that we followed and the knowledge about urban poverty that the Ramanagaram Financial Diaries project gave us. This was carried out more in the spirit of Peter Park’s (2001) having ‘ordinary people address common needs arising in their daily lives and, in the process generate knowledge’ (p. 81). We shed light on some of those processes, and the knowledge generated thereby. The knowledge, we gathered will be in the form of answering the ‘whys’ to some commonly held generalizations about the urban poor and poverty, gathered from our discussions in the process of collation of diary entries with them. Our methodology of working with our research participants helped us together in evolving some keen insights, which can rarely be gleaned from surveys, interviews, or any of the mainstream methodological tools used in understanding poverty. In the process, we were able to go beyond generic solutions propounded for alleviating poverty. For example, in the diaries of many of our women-headed households, we noted that ‘eating out’ and ‘expenditure on snacks’ were regular expenses. This consumption of snacks is not to be seen as a ‘temptation good’, on which they should curb their spending. It was an expense arising from the informal nature of employment, where cooking at home was a luxury. With increasing participation of women in the workforce, especially in developing countries, provision of affordable, nutritious and hygienic food, outside of homes, is something that needs to be given thought to. We found that expenses on social and religious occasions (birthdays, religious festivals, social occasions like marriages) were high because all these occasions were also seen as opportunities to cultivate informal financial relations in an environment where access to formal financial structures was woefully inadequate. Thus, consumption credit for the poor, to smoothen their sporadic and volatile incomes, is a necessity today and micro-credit providers cannot afford to ignore it. We were able to get these insights because our diary writers were able to question, to debate, to reflect and give us an insider’s insight into their condition, and not merely respond to one-shot questions, as they would do in surveys or questionnaires or interviews. More importantly, their understanding of these ‘whys’ showed the acumen our diary writers had acquired in the process of constructing and using their own knowledge (Reason & Bradbury, 2001). While concluding, we will dwell on what we felt was in it for our participants, the reasons did they become involved in the project and how, if at all, was this seen to be of value by/for them.

Ramanagaram Financial Diaries – participants as diary writers

The methodology of financial diaries (Rutherford, 2001) involves daily tracking of cash inflows and cash outflows of poor households with a view to recording the financial transactions of the household. It is complied by means of periodic interviews with a chosen sample of households over the study period, generally a year. It was first carried out in Bangladesh by Stuart Rutherford and India by Orlanda Ruthven, and was extended by Daryl Collins in South Africa (Collins et al., 2009). The financial diaries methodology, thus involves repeated interactions with participants, giving an opportunity to researchers to get to know their respondents fairly intimately. In the process of collecting information for these diaries, we are interacting with our participants on a regular basis (once every week or fortnight).

We decided to deviate from the financial diaries methodology by asking our participants to be the diary writers, instead of having our field assistants log their diary entries for them, as was the usual practice. We decided to enlist our diary writers from the members of the all-women credit groups, mainly microfinance institutions (MFI) borrower groups. The state of Karnataka has a rich history with all-women credit groups, and there were many such groups working in the town of Ramanagaram. These groups would be an easy first point of access for us to get to the interested households.

In the usual methodology followed by the financial diaries, field assistants could be trained to keep the diaries for our households in a non-intrusive, empathetic manner. But by having the respondents log-in the diaries themselves, our aim was to include them as co-researchers in understanding the data they gave about themselves. We were aware that we were blurring the lines between the researcher and the researched (Heron & Reason, 2001), but we were of this firm belief that in understanding poverty, it is only the poor who can guide us in making sense of their life experiences. By asking our research ‘subjects’ to be our diary writers, they would be involved proactively in the process of understanding their lives through their day-to-day financial decisions. More importantly, the subtle role reversal that resulted in them giving us information, rather than our asking for information was the cornerstone for building a relationship of trust and equality for mutual inquiry. They, rather than us, were now the experts on knowledge revolving around the diaries. This environment was important because in understanding their decisions, we could have had several questions that we might have hesitated to clarify because of our ‘uneasiness of belonging to the well-to-do class’ (Breman, 2008: p. 27). It was therefore crucial to have a level of interaction where we were not hesitant in asking them about their decisions, and they felt free and empowered to clarify those to us. It also helped that our entire research team (the authors and the three field associates) were women. One of the co-authors, Rajalaxmi was the faculty coordinator for this project. The other co-author – Smita – was the research coordinator. First to join us on this project was Rathana, who lived in Ramanagaram and had worked as a capacity builder with an NGO that worked with women’s issues. She helped us get Sudhamani and Umarani, our other field associates who were field workers with that NGO. All of us were conversant with Kannada ¹ and Hindi, the two languages known to our diary writers. The domestic spaces of our dairy writers were therefore not a taboo to us. They also visited our homes and work places when some of them came down to Bangalore. Despite our cultural and economic differences, being women, there were many common issues that we could share and talk about. We knew we had gained their trust when our diary writers were candid in mentioning expenditures on addictive items like alcohol in their diaries.

Having our diary writers write their own diaries and hand them over periodically to us rather than our going to them to track their cash flows helped build this atmosphere of trust. They now were the repositories of knowledge about their financial decisions, and we were the ones seeking clarifications. Despite belonging to different classes, and having different life experiences, we strived to get to know each other.

Process of recruiting the diary writers

Dialogues had a key role to play in our research, especially in the process of recruitment. We realized that we had to jettison the usual methods of sample selection and recruitment. Since we wanted our respondents to be our diary writers as well, our sampling could not be random, neither could we use a top-down selection fitting some criteria we had in mind. We began by talking to credit groups of poor women, mostly MFI borrowers (all-women groups, as was the norm here) in the two contiguous poor areas of Hajinagar and Ambedkarnagar in Ramanagaram. We chose these areas because of the very active presence of credit groups of poor women. We made sure that none of the lenders or their representatives was present during these discussions. The concept of keeping these financial diaries was something new to them, as well. In these initial meetings, we realized that letting the groups discuss the ‘idea’ of keeping financial diaries was the best means of recruiting our potential diary writers. Unlike recruiting participants for training modules involving topics like health, hygiene, skills-enhancement, or livelihoods – the benefits of keeping financial diaries are less obvious. Therefore, debates and discussions about the very ‘need’ to have such a study are essential. While we can explain the need for such a study at length, we left it to the women to discuss it amongst them. We realized that the woman who was in charge of her household expenses best understood the purpose of the study. We let her explain the benefit of keeping diaries to the others. It took several such dialogues amongst them for some to grasp the purpose of the study. After a woman showed interest in the group discussions, we asked her a convenient time when we could visit her house to talk and discuss these diaries with her family members – husband and in-laws. Often she was keen that this discussion takes place in front of her family members. The time committed to writing these diaries is not trivial, so we were keen that her family members co-operate with her. Family finances is a sensitive issue in familial relationships – and we took pains to explain to the family that we would not want any discord to crop up in the family because of this study. Some women could also be making savings or earnings without the knowledge of their husbands and would not want these issues to be made open. Whenever we were made aware of this, we did not pursue her to be a part of our project. All clarifications regarding the diaries sought by the family were given. The family was also informed about the times the diary writer would have to attend meetings with other diary writers. We read out written statement explaining the purpose of the study, its process, benefits to participants, potential risks and the issue of confidentiality. Since this was a compact neighborhood, word got around quickly and that helped us in visiting homes.

Simplifying the process of diary writing and collation

Discussions were held with our diary writers for the format of these diaries. We decided to have a very simple format. Since the diaries were to be logged-in by our respondents and not the field staff, we had to keep in mind the needs of our diary writers. We did not put any structure on the diaries, giving them the freedom to log-in the diaries as they wished. So the categories of the expenditures were left open ended for their convenience. The diary had one page for one day. Each page had two columns – one for cash inflows (written simply as ‘money that comes to your home’ in Kannada) and one for cash outflows (‘money that goes out of your home’), and a space for the date. These diaries along with ball-point pens were given to our diary writers. A sample of a diary page is shown in Figure 1. OPEN IN VIEWER

We along with our field workers would then visit the neighborhoods to collate the diaries. We had distributed the days on which we would visit these neighborhoods, and a typical visit to a household for data collation was once a week. We also had to keep in mind that most of our diary writers went to work during the day, so the collation had to be in the evenings. In the process of collation of the diary-entries, items like loan-repayments, vegetable-prices, food-prices were discussed and validated. This also helped in verification of the diary entries. Since this was a compact neighbourhood, the collation of the diary entries by our field workers was done in groups. Diary-groups were thus informally self-selected, where a group of women got together regularly to give their diaries to us. The importance of this group-research in obtaining more interesting, reliable and cross-referenced results (Fals Borda, 2001) cannot be emphasized more.

The need to keep diaries by the women themselves thus went beyond the question of tweaking the financial diaries methodology. It led to better research because it involved the diary writers directly in the process of research as the diaries did not get filtered through investigations and questions of outsiders – the field assistants. It was participative research, but more than that, we felt that the process of keeping daily diaries stimulated our diary writers to think in fresh ways about their incomes and expenditures. For example, one of the key items that kept coming up in their diaries of several participants was the repayment to several MFIs operating in Ramanagaram. Many diary writers did not even know the name of the MFI to which they were indebted, and the MFI was identified in the diaries by the day of week on which the repayment had to be made (e.g. Monday Sangha ² repayment – Rs. 119; Wednesday Sangha repayment – Rs. 247). The break-up of the interest and principal component in these repayments was not known, and they told us that nobody gave them this information and they never realized that they could ask for it. This gives important clues to the extent of over indebtedness in their daily lives. They were always aware of their vulnerability due to indebtedness, but having to see it in black and white while writing their diaries brought it home to them, starkly.

The pilot study with 20 diary writers went on for three months from October to December 2007. We then rolled out an 11-month-long study among 90 odd participants living in the same areas from September 2008 to August 2009. Here, our original 20 participants helped us recruit the diary writers for the yearlong study. In fact, the demonstration effect worked wonders, and walking along the streets our participants lived, we were often asked about what we were doing, visiting these families every week. That also helped us garner support for our lengthier, yearlong study.

Action research – Going behind the numbers

All our diary households were poor, given the current flavor of defining poverty – living on less than two dollars a day per person. Our participants had varied occupations in the informal sector – covering a wide gamut of types – labour in the filature ³ units of Ramanagaram (seasonal but predictable, depending on the supply of silk cocoons), informal enterprises (mainly selling of sweetmeats, vegetables, bangles, utensils – some home-based, but most involved door to door peddling), job-work (informal contracts like beedi or agarbatti ⁴ rolling – home based), coolie-work (daily-wages-work for carrying loads) and municipality sweepers. Since incomes were low and unpredictable, there was no scope of having any slack in their expenditures. In the year that followed, we came to know our diary writers very well. We participated in their rituals and festivals, had food in their homes and attended their marriages. This, to us was important. By partaking their food and participating in their festivals, we in our own way, working towards ‘creation of shifts in the balance of power’ (Selener, 1997, p. 12 quoted in Reason & Bradbury, 2001) between the so-called researched and researchers and this case, also between the poor and the elite. Once a week or fortnight, to leave the hallowed precincts of Academia and join our women in their homes in Ramanagaram became an occasion to look forward to. While Id and Yugadi were festivals we knew of, we also came to know of the Ramanagaram oor-habba (festival celebrating the native gods/goddesses of the place) and other local jatres (fairs).

We list below some of the questions that cropped up in the discussion of the diaries with our diary writers. These questions were the topics, which our diary writers debated and discussed, since they came up most recurrently in their diaries. These were also topics on which, our understanding was contrary to that of our diary writers, and it resulted in a lot of stimulating discussion amongst us. The trust that we gained and the mutual reflection that we were able to do in trying to understand their situation helped us obtain some crucial (and sometimes contrarian) insights into the lives of the urban poor. Action research is said to lead to changes in the use of language (Reason & Bradbury, 2001). While our diary writers reflected on these ‘whys’ – they were part of this changed discourse. Some of them did blame the gods and fate – but most saw their ills as structural – the squalor of the place they lived in, the precarious nature of their jobs, the exploitative credit and labour contracts they got into.

Conclusion and what was in it for the diary writers?

Any research project to understand the lives of the poor has to involve them in mutual reflection and inquiry over a period of time. In the Ramanagaram Financial Diaries, having our respondents as our diary writers, we were explicitly recognizing their role in creation of knowledge. In the discussion groups, they were able to examine and articulate exactly how this process of self-discovery in the keeping of diaries contributed to their understanding of their poverty. Most traditional research on poverty unfortunately does not go beyond our research desks detailing the characteristics what it means to be poor, without truly understanding the structural roots for the pervasiveness of poverty. Therefore, the solutions veer disproportionately around what the poor should be ‘nudged’ to do. There needs to be more discussion on some of the structural changes that could help improve their lives. For example, if high calorific, local grains like ragi were made available through the PDS network in Ramanagaram (instead of the centrally procured rice and wheat), our diary writers would have bought them. Similarly, though micro-credit through the MFI is very popular – not much thought is given to the fact that the poor also need an instrument that helps them match their lumpy incomes to consumption. It should also be understood that easy access to credit could not replace a steady source of income and livelihoods.

In the Ramanagaram Financial Diaries project, we began with reflexivity – recognising the fact that being outsiders to poverty, we will always struggle finding a lens to analyze it. What made our task a bit easier was the fact that we were a group of women wanting to connect with another group of women. As we mentioned in Ramanagaram Financial Diaries – Participants as Diary Writers section, this helped us break the cultural and economic barrier and establish trust, which made the process easier and meaningful. In the end, this turned out to be a process of consciousness raising for both of us. For us, it was a process of a continuous dialogue asking them to explain to us several things that we felt we did not understand, never having to go through the life experiences that they had. The question still remains: what was in it for them? Why did 20 women in the pilot phase and 70 additional women in the yearlong project agree to give more than 11 months of their time on this project? We had no dropouts. The four diary writers who could not complete their diaries were the ones who had relocated from our study area. We could speculate and provide glib answers like these diaries and this project helping towards their financial literacy. We, however, do not believe this was the case. While we were involved in this project, what became amply clear to us was that most of our diary writers were financially literate – not by the formal definition of financial literacy, but they were more efficient users of money than many of us. The answers, we think, lay elsewhere. It lay in them calling themselves the ‘diary-ladies’, it lay in the support that they got from the diary groups and most important we would like to think that the answers lay in the question they asked us towards the end of the project

You have our diary-entries and will go back to Bangalore – what is going to be our future? Is this all there is to it?

This, we truly believe was a process of their consciousness raising – ‘their ability to think and act critically’ (Park, 2001: p. 81). It forced us and them to think of ways in which could engage on a more fruitful, continuing basis. Researchers working with the poor should have clarity on their methodologies and ‘for what purpose, or better, for whose purposes will they be used’ (Uphoff, 2003: p. 34). Key stakeholders are the poor themselves, so that they understand their lives better and act more effectively. The task rarely ends with the end of the research project. It was not enough having them as co-researchers or involving them in our discussions about our findings. It is in fact after that that the ‘action’ kicks in.

In our more than a yearlong association with the ‘diary-ladies’ of Ramanagaram, we realized that the key problem faced by them was the absence of a steady income. The most important need was for a sustainable means of livelihood. Employment in the informal sector is also welcome as long as the wages were regular and assured. After pondering over the question of livelihoods and after discussions with our diary writers, we considered the idea of setting up a small, group-based venture around hand embroidery. Many of them already possessed this skill. This is a traditional skill of women belonging to the families in this area. Girls in these families embroider intricate designs on their bridal trousseaus. We saw potential to upgrade these skills and create markets and provide links with existing markets. Being in a business school, we also involved our students in this venture. We helped kick start a self-help group with some of our diary writers (who were adept at hand-embroidery) to train them in the making and marketing of hand-embroidered fashion accessories. They called themselves ‘Minchu’ (meaning ‘shine’ in Kannada). The Minchu Mahila Kaigarika Sangha (Minchu Women’s Hand-Embroidery Self Help Group ⁵ ), started sometime in 2008 just before our project formally ended, still works at Ramanagaram. Although the financial diaries study at Ramanagaram has ended, we continue to be involved in some capacity or the other, with a few of our diary writers through Minchu. This was not something that we had planned for. It came about as a result of our research using the financial diaries. Indeed, it has provoked us to take on this extremely complex issue of livelihoods among the poor because we hope our continued efforts in working with our participants will give some meaningful insights.