ABSTRACT
In the late 1970s, Muhammad Yunus began making small loans to the rural poor in Bangladesh. By 1982, he had provided almost 30,000 small loans through existing financial institutions, and a year later formed Grameen Bank to provide loans directly. The Grameen Bank is often presented as a scaling success story in which an innovation created transformative impacts at scale through a combination of organisational, sectoral, and personal growth. The process of technical justification may vary depending on the nature of the innovation, the sector in which it falls, the context in which it is being scaled, and the partners on whom scaling depends. Justification promotes three postulates—scaling is a choice that must be justified, justification is informed by values alongside evidence, and the choice to scale is shared by the innovators and the people impacted. Scaling the programme changes uncertainty, and uncertainty introduces upside and downside risk.
