Design spaces for refugee girls / women

The unprecedented present of this century’s refugee crisis manifests in landscapes of perceived ephemerality, which fail to account for the protracted reality of displacement. These environments are often stipulated to remain ‘temporary’ while political solutions are deliberated. However, short-term interventions often linger for years ultimately hindering the lives of refugees, particularly those of girls and women, in ways big and small, tangible and intangible. 

In a collaborative process, we work with groups of refugee girls and women to design adaptable spaces tailored to their needs, hopes, and imaginations. We provide women with private and public spaces for social connections, academic aspirations, and business opportunities. 

Our solution leverages local resources and natural materials to empower community members as stewards of their own environments. This approach can provide countless opportunities for tens of millions of women around the world while reducing dependency on intergovernmental agencies and minimizing ecological damage in refugee camps.

We are based in Bangladesh and work with Rohingya refugees living in camps, one of which has grown into the “largest and most densely populated refugee settlement in the world,” according to the UN. The camps shelter both registered refugees as well as hundreds of thousands of stateless Rohingya men, women, and children who were violently expelled from Myanmar in 2017. Not only were thousands of lives and livelihoods lost then, but women continue to face slower kinds of violence. 

Cultural norms and constructed environments preclude women’s access to spaces suited to their needs. Based on fieldwork, women currently spend 30-40 minutes outside every day. A few women’s centers exist, but they rarely offer daycare services, prayer rooms, outdoor spaces, social gathering capacity, schools, or other economic opportunities. 

Responses from NGOs and agencies struggle to transition from emergency distribution to long-term planning for women. Emergency shelters provide little privacy or dignity and are highly susceptible to cyclones, fires, landslides, and floods. Equally concerning, the global scale of plastic production conceals vast ecological footprints while inducing systems of foreign dependency that undermine principles of empowerment. The failure to address long-term livelihoods ultimately becomes just as dangerous as the violence causing displacement.

Our team is a social enterprise and our solution is a process of collaboration with refugee girls and women to design spaces and environments that meet both their immediate needs while planning for long-term educational, economic, and ecological growth of the community. This process commences when international agencies have stabilized responses to forced migration. Most NGOs and international bodies rely on (imported) models; however, rather than providing a single product, app, service, or plan, we adopt a holistic approach beginning with discussions and questions for girls, women, and community representatives. 

We invest directly in the community to ensure that interventions are crafted by group collaboration, ancient technology, and local materials. This process creates jobs and environments that are easily stewarded, maintained, adapted, and expanded by the community. 

We establish local partnerships, identify needs, and design solutions and spaces carefully crafted to provide social, academic, and economic opportunities for women. We continue to help establish business plans and expand market access beyond camp borders through stories, publications, exhibitions, and sales of products made in the camps. Funds from these efforts then flow back into the women’s groups.

This solution specifically serves Rohingya refugee girls and women living in Bangladesh. They are stateless refugees from the Rakhine State of Myanmar, where they were persecuted for decades. In response to violence in 2017, an attack that much of the world has labeled genocide, they crossed the border into Bangladesh and are now living near registered camps built in the 1990s. Due to severe marginalization of girls and women in these communities, we have chosen to work primarily with them. 

We begin projects with questions for women in each community. These women have lost almost everything and we believe the first act of empowerment is asking them what will most benefit their specific community, neighborhood, family. We then create schools, trade centers, social spaces, and other types of work opportunities with business plans for them to provide for their families. 

This process also creates education, employment, and empowerment while reducing inequities and ecological damage and offering leadership positions for women. This is a crucial moment to elevate the voices of women since the “social perceptions of women’s ‘honour’ are transitioning in the camps due to displacement and camp context.” (Voices of our Hearts: Honour in Transition, April 2020).

We recognize that the sphere of ideas for refugee communities is vast and varied, but based on our experience no idea will make much impact if the barriers to safe and reliable spaces, particularly for the most vulnerable community members, are not first removed. This is the reason we focus on removing these barriers and creating spaces for girls and women so their educational and economic opportunities may grow.

We believe there is widespread emphasis on and celebration of new technology (new gadgetry), but it often comes at the expense of local input and ancient knowledge. There is no shortage of development for refugee communities including (but not limited to) housing kits, international standards (SPHERE, etc), and more recently apps and other devices that expedite access to services and information. While certainly useful (even necessary at times), these efforts often ignore or, in worst case scenarios, undermine cultural realities and long-term empowerment. Most items distributed by international agencies and NGOs are almost exclusively designed, built, and implemented or distributed by members outside the refugee community. All of these processes could create more local jobs and opportunities which are so desperately needed and desired in refugee camps. Our solution, less 'innovative' as viewed by some, is new in how we curate input from community members, design solutions using local labor and materials, and prioritize empowerment of the most marginalized members. 

There is no single, core technology in our solution. Instead, we rely on a multitude of local technologies, and a process of collaboration and inclusion to define specific tactics and strategies required to empower each community. However, there are common beliefs and approaches in how we approach different problems. We believe, wherever possible, in leveraging resources of the community. This includes referencing local architectural environments built with local materials and labor. Both women and men in the camps ask primarily about jobs and education, yet this is often ignored by NGOs and other bodies who could attempt to hire more members of the refugee and host communities.

Our spatial technology is based on principles of vernacular architecture from both Bangladesh, the Rakhine State, and the broader region. This includes earthen and bamboo structural systems, among others. We have begun implementing some of these systems, and have yet to implement others. These systems and technologies has been tested by centuries of development and much of the knowledge is already embedded in the community. 

Our longer-term outcome is the empowerment of the most vulnerable groups in refugee communities (in this case, girls and women). That outcome is achieved through constant collaboration and empowerment resulting from daily activities where women's opinions and leadership are prioritized. No single technology or product can achieve this by itself. Instead, it is a slow and long-term process that achieves this goal. 

Putting women in leadership positions has impacted the Rohingya refugee community living in Bangladesh since the 1990s. A community system of governance has developed in the registered camps where women have direct input as elected leaders. This system has yet to develop in the extension camps formed three years ago, but by continuing to empower women through educational and economic opportunities, we help hasten this movement. 

We currently have one pilot project that serves a different community of 80 women every three months. To date, this has provided skill training to 320 women in a single community. We have already begun designing new solutions for other groups of girls and women and in one year (depending on how the current health crisis unfolds), we hope to be serving 600+ people. In five years, we hope to directly serve over 2,000 people. 

We have created partnerships in the refugee and host communities, including with elected members of local government in Bangladesh. We need to bolster those connections in order to scale these solutions to the other camps. Scaling our solutions can positively affect hundreds of thousands of women in this region. Indirectly our solutions could ultimately benefit millions of people, including members of the host community. 

Furthermore, processes of inclusionary design and local resources could changes the lives of tens of millions of refugees around the world. 

One of the biggest barriers is the inertia of standard practices that obscure local involvement of marginalized groups in refugee communities. We need other agencies and NGOs to invest more in local labor and technology while supporting marginalized members of the community. 

Additionally, helping establish business models that extend opportunities beyond camp borders is time-consuming and difficult. 

We currently have two leaders for this solution as well as a team of five support staff who handle research, marketing, and oversight. 

Our team possess a diverse background from business to design and we are looking to acquire additional members. Additionally, we partner with members of the refugee community. 

Esrat Karim

- Founder and CEO (Amal Foundation)

- Acumen Fellow 

- Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia

Tommy Schaperkotter

- Master in Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design

UNHCR - Logistical support

Hope Humanitarian - Financial support 

MIT ReACT - Refugee Action Hub 

MIT D-Lab