Adopt
A set of governing documents does not produce a measuring body. What produced one was a sequence: reach people at scale, find the serious ones, train them on real work, put them in the field, measure, and then hand them an institution. CARO ran that sequence in Bangladesh between 2024 and 2026. This is what it was, stage by stage, with the instruments used at each.
Six stages. Each one fed the next, and the last one produced an institution that owns the work.
CARO ran this as MEP, a mass civic awareness programme across more than 450 educational institutions in all eight divisions of Bangladesh. Foundational governance literacy to populations with no prior exposure to formal civic education, and the first introduction to structural thinking: why systems fail, rather than who to blame. Most participants went no further.
CARO ran this as the Campus Ambassador Programme, a six-month fellowship. 450+ applications from 143 campuses in the first major cohort; 392 selected across 247 universities. Ambassadors hosted governance events, drove participation in the Index survey, and built the national network from inside the universities rather than outside them.
CARO ran this as VEP, a three-month immersive programme for ages 16–35. Four batches, 130+ selected. Participants were allocated to actual departments — research, communications, HR, fundraising, international relations — and contributed to live deliverables with their names on published work. A training programme that produces nothing real produces nobody real.
CARO ran this as CMEP, the grassroots research infrastructure. Roughly 450 trained volunteers conducting structured community research on governance perceptions and institutional trust. This is what built the documented network of 2,259 verified participants across 211 of Bangladesh’s 300 parliamentary constituencies, with 16 divisional leaders. It served two purposes at once: producing data, and developing the fieldwork competence the later stages required.
CARO ran this as Bangladesh Nexus, a national research competition for university students paired with an independent mixed-methods governance study. Eight research domains, six months, open to all universities. The purpose was not the competition. It was that a country with talent and no research culture produces no evidence, and a measurement body with no evidence has nothing to measure against.
From participants with three to six programmes of demonstrated commitment, 36 were identified as founding leaders. On 1 November 2026 members of that group subscribed a memorandum and founded CARO Bangladesh Society — governed by its own members, electing its own officers, able to remove anyone including the people who founded it. CARO’s field work passed to it and CARO stopped operating in Bangladesh.
PlayerOne — governance simulation, and an Index collection point.
A participant takes the role of a decision-maker: allocating budgets under constraint, navigating public hearings, weighing citizen demands against institutional limits, and evaluating each decision against structural fairness principles. It teaches what a governance choice actually feels like from inside, which no reading does, and it collects Fairness Index responses in-simulation.
It remains live and open. Any body adopting the standard may use it as its training layer; nothing needs to be asked.
Most measurement projects die the same way, and it is never for lack of a method.
They die because the founder moves on, because a funder wants a number changed, because the people who collect the readings were never members of anything, or because after three years nobody can remember why the first question was worded that way. The instrument survives. The practice does not.
The test that matters is not whether a body can produce a good first report. It is whether a local unit is still taking readings in month thirty, on a fixed rhythm, when no one is checking. Nothing in a methodology answers that. It is answered by how the body is constituted — who may remove whom, who may withhold a finding, what happens automatically when performance falls, and whether the people doing the work own the thing they are doing it for.
Drafted against the Societies Registration Act 1860. The structure is jurisdiction-neutral; the statutory references are not.
Purpose, powers, limitations, membership and the signing instrument. Includes the clause binding every authority to a verifiable obligation, and the bar on party affiliation and on preparing any person for public office.
Membership and good standing, local units, the general body, the executive council, domain review, elections, findings and data, independence, self-measurement, accounts, conflict of interest, safeguarding, amendment and dissolution.
Run of show, resolutions in full, the chair's script, the election commission's procedure, the minute taker's checklist, and a live record workbook that counts the ballots and flags an impossible result.
Ballot specifications, the roll rule, candidacy conditions, tie procedure, and the annual measurement the commission performs on every office — what was required, what was done, on what dates.
Domain reviewers with record access the council cannot refuse, the measurement panel that designs instruments but never results, and the automatic structural review that begins without any motion when a score falls below threshold.
Why each clause reads as it does, including the drafts that were wrong first. This is the part that cannot be reverse-engineered from the documents, and the part that stops a later committee amending a protection it no longer understands.
No fee, no application, no approval.
Write to admin@carononprofit.org with what you are forming and where. You will receive the documents, the reasoning behind each clause, and which provisions are statutory to Bangladesh and will need replacing in your jurisdiction.
No founder clause. None.
The first draft reserved standing powers to the founder — a veto on changing the purpose, a permanent seat. It was removed entirely, and the word does not appear in the final document. A body whose argument is that capture happens through reasonable-looking structures cannot itself contain capture insurance. What replaced it is democratic: a qualifying period to vote on changing the purpose, consent from a majority of local units, ninety days' notice, and the old purpose published alongside the new one for ten years.
Reviewers audit; they do not hold portfolios.
The obvious design gives each domain to a secretary who does the work in it. That produces people marking their own homework. Instead the council does all the work, and a separately elected reviewer checks it — with access to every record bearing on the domain, written answers owed within thirty days, and no power in the council to direct, alter, delay or withhold a review. Reviewers may hold no council office. It is the only structural separation that survives a weak year.
The body measures itself, and the review starts by itself.
Annual self-measurement is common and usually decorative, because acting on a bad result requires someone to propose acting on it. Here, a score below a threshold set by the membership triggers a structural review automatically — no motion, no requisition, no permission — conducted by members holding no office, appointed by the election commission. The council must hand over every record requested. Removing the discretion is the entire point.
A finding, once verified, cannot be withdrawn by anyone.
Not by an officer, a member, a donor, a partner or an affiliated body. It may be corrected only by the methodology's own procedure, and the correction is published alongside the original, which stays available. Any agreement term purporting to give a funder power over a finding is void, and the rest of the agreement stands. A measurement body that can be talked out of a number has no product.
One member, one vote — and no class of membership that carries more.
Not length of service, not office held, not contribution. Where a decision needs extra protection the answer is a qualifying period that applies equally to everyone, never a weighted vote. The moment any person's vote counts for more, the body has conceded the thing it exists to measure.
Complaints run past everyone, including the top.
A complaint may be made against any member or officer without exception, directly, without passing through anyone senior to the complainant. The committee that hears it is headed by a woman, a majority women, and includes members from outside the body. Nobody may be disadvantaged for complaining in good faith. Seniority exempts no one from being complained about.
In this order.
The documents constrain the people adopting them more than anyone else. If a founding group is not willing to be measured, audited and complained about, the kit will produce a body that looks right and does nothing.
The structure is portable; the statutory references are not. Replace them, keep the clause numbering continuous across both documents so the entrenchment list still works, and have a local lawyer read it before anyone signs.
Both the governing body and the membership. The ratio is usually a condition of registration, not a guideline, and a body that founds below it cannot file.
Subscribe the memorandum, adopt the rules, appoint the election commission from members not standing for office, then elect the council, then the reviewers. The order is fixed: a person elected to the council may not take a reviewer seat at the same meeting.
Most registrars want a verifiable office they can inspect. A cheap room with a signboard is the real thing; a postal address usually is not.
The first readings will be imperfect and should be published with their limits stated. A body that waits for a clean instrument never starts, and the rhythm matters more than the first result.
The kit is published for anyone to use, adapt, translate and instantiate, for any population, with no fee, no licence to apply for and no permission to request. CARO claims no authority over any body that adopts it, no seat on it, and no say in its findings. A body using this kit is not a chapter, a branch or an affiliate of CARO, and CARO does not act for it or bind it.
Two requests, neither of them enforceable. Keep the provenance — state what was measured, where, when, how the sample was drawn and what was excluded. And tell us, so the record of who has adopted the standard is accurate. That record is the only thing CARO asks for in return, and it is the only way anyone finds out whether this replicates.
The kit has produced one body. It is days old.
Founded by twelve subscribing members under the Societies Registration Act 1860, with a memorandum and rules adopted from this kit. It is an independent body, separately governed by its own members, which CARO does not direct, does not fund as a controller and does not act for. Its registration is not yet complete and its council is not yet fully constituted. Whether it is still taking readings in month thirty is the only question that matters, and it cannot be answered yet.