(music)
[Mehnaz] The US Trade and Development Agency
is the infrastructure project preparation arm
of US government.
When we look at a project like smart grid,
it is very important to see
that we are addressing the challenges
of giving good quality, sustained, 24/7 power
to these places,
especially the critical infrastructure,
including health care.
And Bangladesh was lagging quite behind.
And amongst the work which we have done
with the Boston Consulting Group
in a sustained way, is on the smart grid
improvisation and modernization.
Not only that it is a big priority
of the country and its administration,
it is also a big priority to see that
how we are connecting the best of US businesses
to these markets.
-: BCG brought in a lot
of relevant global experience across Europe,
South America, India.
So we actually chose two
of the leading utilities of Bangladesh--
one in the distribution sector, DPDC,
and one in the transmission sector, PGCB.
Now, for those two utilities,
we created a tailored smart grid roadmap.
We also realized that preparing our roadmap
without arranging financing is no good.
So we engaged with the financiers very early on.
So we created something called,
the Smart Grid Innovation Hub.
People skilled in smart grid technologies,
smart grid policies, other aspects
of smart grid strategy will be housed.
Mehnaz: The stakeholders in Bangladesh
can look at it, learn, because not everyone
can travel across the globe to see it,
learn from the in-house expertise
which was developed.
-: We understood very early on
that the utilities will not be able
to handle the smart grid projects
if we didn't build capacity.
So we conducted close
to 20 capacity-building sessions
for the utilities to actually bring their people
up to speed on how to handle these projects.
BCG is at its best when we bring expertise
from around the world together.
We brought in smart grid experts
from South America, from Spain,
from North America, from Southeast Asia.
In this case we had more than 50 experts
engaged in the project.
-: It is a talking grid now,
and Bangladesh has all the capacities
which it needs for a baseline structure
to have that ahead of the curve,
smart grid center, and smart grid deployment,
which I really hope to see
in the next five to ten years coming forward
in that country.
(soft gentle music)