InstitutionClaim Cited
BRAC's 1980–1990 Oral Therapy Extension Programme brought oral-rehydration teaching to roughly twelve million rural households through women educators, household demonstrations, sampled monitoring, and repeated changes to the delivery system. The evidence supports extraordinary reach and learning at scale, but it does not isolate BRAC's effect on mortality and does not erase the income and gender risks built into performance-linked pay.
How did BRAC turn oral rehydration from a laboratory and clinic treatment into knowledge that millions of rural households could use safely?
InstitutionClaim Cited
Grameen Bank replaced conventional collateral with small loans, recurring village meetings, peer groups, savings, and progressive access to credit, bringing millions of poor Bangladeshi women into a formal financial relationship. The system made dispersed lending operational, but also placed repayment discipline inside borrowers' social relationships; evidence about Grameen's institution is stronger than any claim that microcredit alone reliably ends poverty.
Can a lender replace collateral with relationships without converting a community's trust and pressure into an invisible collection technology?
Organizational CaseClaim Cited
The Rana Plaza collapse exposed a garment supply chain in which commercial power traveled across borders while responsibility for building safety stopped at the factory door. The Bangladesh Accord answered with a binding brand-union agreement, independent inspections, public corrective-action plans, remediation duties, worker training, safety committees, and complaints. It changed the governance of physical safety without resolving poverty wages, freedom of association, buyer pressure, or protection beyond covered factories.
How can responsibility for worker safety be made to follow the commercial power that organizes a global supply chain?