Solar Panels illuminated rural Bangladesh

Highlights

• The country's first solar-lit homes appeared in Narsingdi district in the mid-1990s, with no grid connection anywhere nearby
• IDCOL's national Solar Home System programme launched in January 2003, hitting its five-year target of 50,000 households in just three years
• By 2013, over 80,000 new systems were being installed some months — one of the fastest-growing solar programmes in the world
• More than 4.1 million systems were installed by 2018, reaching roughly 20 million people, or 14% of Bangladesh's population
• Highest household penetration was recorded in Barisal (39%) and Sylhet (30%) divisions
• The programme avoided an estimated 9.6 million tonnes of CO2 and 4.4 billion litres of kerosene between 2003 and 2018
• As the national grid expanded to cover 97% of the country by 2020, demand for paid solar systems collapsed
• By 2023, IDCOL had written off or waived roughly Tk691 crore in bad loans across 44 partner organisations

It was a quiet monsoon night in Narsingdi, sometime in the mid-1990s, when a handful of tin-roofed homes lit up without a single wire running to them.

There was no grid connection for kilometres. No transformer humming somewhere down the road, no pole carrying current from a distant power station. Just a panel bolted to a rooftop, a car battery wired into a back room, and a bulb that stayed on long after the sun went down. For families who had spent their evenings under the weak orange flicker of a kerosene lamp, it must have looked like something closer to a magic trick than a technology.

It wasn't magic. It was the first real test of an idea that would, over the next two decades, reach into roughly four million rural homes.

It begins with two separate, uncoordinated attempts to solve the same problem, both converging — almost by accident — on the same stretch of central Bangladesh.

In 1996, a Grameen Bank engineer named Dipal C. Barua began experimenting with low-cost solar panels for rural households, riding on the microfinance network Grameen Bank had already spent two decades building. There was no financing model yet, no trained technicians, no supply chain. Panels were expensive, imported, and nobody in the village knew how to fix one when it broke. Barua was, in effect, building the plane while flying it. A year later, the state-run Bangladesh Rural Electrification Board ran its own experiment a few unions over — a formal pilot that put solar panels on roughly 850 homes in Narsingdi district. The same year, BRAC entered the picture too, launching its own solar energy programme.

By the early 2000s, roughly three-quarters of rural Bangladesh still had no electricity of any kind — the World Bank's own account puts the rural electrification rate at under 27% when the national programme launched, with about 15 million rural households still unelectrified at that point. 

Instead of importing a financing model that had worked in Sri Lanka, as originally planned, the newly formed Infrastructure Development Company Limited built the national programme around Grameen Shakti's existing network of rural vendors and microcredit relationships — leveraging, as the World Bank later described it, the domestic microfinance capacity and NGO/private-sector distribution Bangladesh already had, rather than building new institutions from scratch. IDCOL launched the Solar Home System programme in January 2003. The target was modest by later standards: 50,000 households in five years. It took three.

The decade of the rooftop panel

What followed was less a programme than a wave.

By 2013, IDCOL and its network of partner organisations — 56 of them by then — were installing tens of thousands of new systems every month, at one point crossing 80,000 units in a single month, with nearly two million systems on rooftops nationwide by January of that year. 

By 2018, IDCOL's own figures — later confirmed in the World Bank's 15-year retrospective — put the total at just over 4.1 million systems sold, bringing electricity to about 14% of the national population per the 2011 Census, or roughly 20 million people. The report notes this let a quarter of the rural population that was unelectrified in 2003 get power far sooner than grid expansion alone would have allowed. Systems were used mainly for lighting, mobile-phone charging, and running TVs and radios, and also powered about 200,000 rural businesses and religious facilities. A separate 2025 academic study on the programme's socio-economic impact adds a geographic layer to the numbers: penetration was highest in Barisal division, at 39% of households, followed by Sylhet at 30%, with Chittagong also among the leaders — a pattern consistent with these being the divisions furthest from reliable grid coverage.

The World Bank separately estimated that between 2003 and 2018 the programme cut greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 9.6 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent and avoided the consumption of 4.4 billion litres of kerosene for household lighting.

A lot of people were helped by the solar panels. Among them was Kusum, a 10-year-old student in a solar-electrified household, who told the World Bank that her lighting made a direct difference in her schoolwork: "We can study much better now. The solar lights have helped us a lot with our education." 

What the grid did to the story

The same national ambition that made solar necessary — universal electricity access — eventually became the thing that undercut it. As Bangladesh's conventional grid expanded aggressively through the 2010s, reaching 97% of the country by 2020, the very isolation that had made off-grid solar essential began to disappear. In some areas, the government began distributing solar systems for free under separate safety-net programmes, undercutting the loan-based model IDCOL and its partners had built their business around.

Grameen Shakti, still the largest partner organisation in the network, later described the programme as having entered a state of virtual closure from 2014 onward, as households increasingly stopped repaying loans on systems competing with a free, wired alternative next door. By 2023, IDCOL's board had approved writing off or waiving roughly Tk691 crore in bad loans across 44 partner organisations, while Grameen Shakti itself sought a waiver of half its outstanding Tk420 crore balance.