Workers and Stakeholder Consultation for Climate-Responsive Worker Capacity Building and Toolkit Development in Bangladesh

This project is being implemented jointly by the Centre for Entrepreneurship Development, BRAC University (CED-BRACU) and Nexus360 for RISE (Reimagining Industry to Support Equality) where our Managing Director, Md. Avi Hossain, along with Shammin Sultana and Sadiq Mahmood, are serving as the Nexus360 research team.

Project Summary

RISE commissioned this consultation to establish what a warming climate is doing to workers in Bangladesh’s ready-made garment and textile sector, and what capacity building and factory-level tools would help. Fieldwork ran between August and September 2026 across thirteen consultations: four focus group discussions with forty workers, two inside factories and two away from any workplace, and nine key informant interviews with factory management, worker organisations and employers’ associations, at sites inside and outside the export processing zones in Dhaka, Narayanganj, Ashulia and Chattogram. Every transcript is traceable to the stakeholder who said it, which is the basis for the consultation summary report and for a recommended eighteen-item factory toolkit.

Project Responsibilities

1. Adapting the consultation instruments to the Bangladesh context from the parallel RISE tool, and piloting them before use
2. Designing the sample across export processing zone and non-EPZ factories and across compliance tiers, with community-based groups included to offset the more positive picture that factory-hosted discussions produce
3. Conducting four worker focus group discussions and nine key informant interviews in Bangla across four locations, and producing a bilingual transcript for each
4. Drafting the consultation summary report, from climate risks and worker impacts through training needs, factory-level systems and existing good practices to the recommended toolkit and recommendations to RISE
5. Specifying the eighteen-item toolkit in dependency order, from the adverse weather attendance and wage protection policy through to the ready-to-run training pack
6. Presenting findings and progress to the client at each stage of fieldwork and drafting
7. Applying a confidentiality protocol throughout, under which every factory, organisation and respondent is identified by code rather than by name