SANEM Energy Outlook: Volume 3, Issue 1 | July 2026
The July 2026 issue focuses on the theme “Green Jobs and Skills: The Missing Link in Bangladesh’s Energy Transition.” The cover page presents concise highlights of four featured articles. The first article, “Green Zones, Green Jobs? The Untapped Employment Promise Inside Bangladesh’s Economic Zones,” emphasizes that Bangladesh’s economic zones have advanced faster on green infrastructure than on green employment, and that without an occupational definition of green jobs, employer-linked training, and zone-level accountability, these zones risk delivering environmental branding without decent or skilled work. The second article, “The Just Transition Gap: Who Gets Left Behind When Bangladesh Phases Out Fossil Fuels?,” highlights that the country’s fossil-fuel phase-out lacks a credible workforce transition plan, with no official data on green jobs and no mapping of where displaced fossil-fuel and industrial workers will go, risking a repeat of the collapse of the solar home systems programme at a much larger scale. The third article, “10,000MW of Solar by 2030, But Who Will Build It?,” underscores that Bangladesh’s ambitious solar target is constrained less by financing or land than by an acute shortage of trained installers, technicians, and engineers, with the national training system yet to catch up to the scale of the workforce the target demands. The final article, “Bangladesh’s Green Transition: Meeting the ESG Challenge,” points out that mandatory ESG compliance is becoming a precondition for market access in key export destinations and that Bangladesh’s manufacturers, particularly smaller firms, face significant barriers in financing, capacity, and certification needed to meet these rising international standards.