Financial Diaries Research

Gojo's source of quantitative data to understand how low-income people live and manage their money

What are financial diaries?

Financial diaries is a research methodology that uses high-frequency panel data of the cashflows of its respondents. In 2020, inspired by the work of our former Outside Director Stuart Rutherford and his Hrishipara Daily Diaries project in Bangladesh, we started exploring opportunities to set up our own financial diaries projects. Gojo's Financial Diaries is focused on low-income households to understand their cashflow management especially areas like income and expenditure, money borrowed, savings activities, and crisis management.

So far, we have commenced two financial diaries projects in Cambodia and Sri Lanka.

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* This is the total number of respondents during the duration of data collection, including those who dropped out and those who were newly recruited.
** On average, we had 130 households participating in the Cambodia Diaries.

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Diarists write in notebooks everyday about their lives.

We provide the respondents of our Sri Lanka Diaries - or as we call them, "diarists" -  with notebooks where they can write their daily financial inflows and outflows. Their financial lives are captured in these notebooks, which we use to try to understand the livelihoods of those who live in Gojo's countries of operation.

Click on the photos on the right for a preview of our Sri Lanka diarists. We have received their consent for their photos to be published, and their names have been changed for their privacy.

We publish stories from our diarists every month.

Snapshots from the Diaries

Explore the graphs below to see the data we extracted from our Cambodia Diaries. 

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Partner with us

We are always exploring new opportunities to deepen our understanding of clients' financial lives and improve our services. If you are interested in collaborating with us and conducting a financial diaries research project, please reach out to us here.

Sign up to receive news from Gojo here.

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