Floating solar, vaccines and safer seas: Alan Talib meets Bangladesh's fisheries minister
Published 14 October 2026 · 3 min read
Who was there
| Minister | Sultan Salauddin Tuku MP, State Minister, Ministry of Fisheries and Livestock, Government of Bangladesh |
| NordGulf Alliance | Alan Talib, CEO and Founder |
| Where and when | Dhaka, 13 October 2026 |
| Discussed | Electricity for villages and floating solar, livestock vaccination, deep-sea fishing |
Some of the most important conversations I have are not about billion dollar deals. They are about the small things that quietly change how people live.
On 13 October in Dhaka I sat down with Sultan Salauddin Tuku MP, State Minister at the Ministry of Fisheries and Livestock of Bangladesh.
We did not talk about grand strategy. We talked about electricity reaching a village that has never had it, about cattle that survive the season because they were vaccinated in time, about fishermen who could go further out and come back safer.
This is where I believe the Nordics have something real to offer.
Solar on the water
Take solar. The usual answer is rooftop panels, one house at a time. Install, connect, move to the next roof. It works, but it is slow, and a village is not one roof.
The Nordic floating solar solution turns that around. A single array on a pond or a reservoir goes in quickly, the installation is far swifter than covering rooftops one by one, and it can light an entire village in a very short turnaround.
Bangladesh is a country of water. That is not a limitation. It is the foundation.
In a country where land is precious and much of it floods each year, putting panels on water that is already there leaves the land for crops and homes.
The quieter things
Then the quieter things. Deep-sea fishing know-how built over generations in cold and unforgiving seas. Simple, proven animal vaccination programmes that protect a farmer's entire livelihood for the price of a few doses.
None of this is complicated technology. A vaccine. A panel on the water. And yet for a family in rural Bangladesh, these small things are the difference between a hard year and a lost one.
What gives me hope is the combination. Nordic technology that works, paired with Gulf capital that can actually fund it. One brings the solution, the other brings the means. Put them together, deployed properly and honestly, and you reach millions of ordinary people who will never read a press release about it.
For Nordic companies with proven floating solar, vaccination or fisheries technology, Bangladesh needs exactly that, at a scale few markets offer. The next step is pairing those solutions with Gulf investors and building structures that let them be funded and delivered.
That is the work. Quietly useful, and worth doing.