Financing resilience for Dhaka’s food vendors in a hotter urban future
Extreme heat is threatening urban livelihoods. Food vendors and other informal workers in cities like Dhaka face growing health and income risks as temperatures rise.
- climate change
- value chains
By Kate AmblerOctober 30, 2026
Key takeaways
- Extreme heat is threatening urban livelihoods. Food vendors and other informal workers in cities like Dhaka face growing health and income risks as temperatures rise.
- A new financing model aims to build resilience. The IFPRI and Shakti Foundation project will help food vendors purchase cooling technologies and defer loan repayments during extreme heat events.
- Innovative finance can support climate adaptation. The initiative will test whether flexible financial products can help vulnerable workers protect their businesses and incomes while reducing lender risk.
On a recent visit to Dhaka, Bangladesh, some colleagues and I visited food vendors as part of ongoing market research to understand their operations and demand for financial products. It was very hot, with temperatures around 35 degrees Celsius. We were lucky to stand in the shade under some trees, but this is not the norm across the city. Vendors may have little more than an umbrella or tarp to provide shade, or they may be pushing a loaded vegetable cart down the street with no protection at all.
Meanwhile, perishable food may sit out all day, with no way to keep it properly hot or cold, a public health threat. Heat waves can push these already hot temperatures above 40 degrees with high levels of humidity, but there are limited resources in place to respond to heat-related emergencies. Rising average temperatures mean these conditions will only get worse in a megacity with one of the largest populations exposed to extreme heat in the world—including a significant population of vulnerable informal workers.
Together with my IFPRI colleagues Mehrab Bakhtiar and Carly Trachtman, I am delighted to be one of the grantees of the first wave of grants from the ClimateWorks Foundation’s Adaptation and Resilience Fund on solutions for extreme heat in urban areas. In partnership with the Shakti Foundation for Disadvantaged Women, we are developing a product that will allow food vendors in Dhaka to finance technologies such as refrigerators, cooling boxes, and batteries to power their carts. The product will feature a parametric heat index based repayment system that allows borrowers to defer repayments during periods of extreme heat.