BRAC gave the poorest a free cow before offering them a loan

By the early 2000s microcredit had spread across Bangladesh as the dominant tool against poverty, built on the premise that even very poor households had some viable income-generating activity that a small loan could expand. BRAC, the country's largest NGO, ran its own microfinance programs but kept encountering a tier of households its own lending consistently failed to reach: the ultra-poor, dependent on casual day labor or begging, with no cash, asset, or business to put a loan toward.

These households were typically excluded from microcredit outright -- seen by lenders as too risky to repay -- which meant the group with the least resilience had the least access to the tool everyone else was using to build one. In 2002 BRAC's Research and Evaluation Division began designing a program, initially called 'Challenging the Frontiers of Poverty Reduction,' specifically for this excluded tier rather than adapting existing microcredit terms for them.