Safety and Social Acceptance for Gender-Diverse Rohingya Youth
Waiting is not a life
Displacement is usually described as an emergency, but for the young people this project worked with it had long since become an ordinary condition. Years in the camp settlements of Ukhia, with formal education and lawful employment both out of reach, produce a particular kind of harm: not the sharp crisis of arrival, but the slow erosion that comes from having nothing to build towards.
This project worked with gender-diverse young people within that population — those carrying a second exclusion on top of displacement itself. Marginalised inside their own community as well as outside it, they have no standing to draw on when something goes wrong, often no family protection to fall back on, and no safe route to the services others can reach. Humanitarian programming in the camps is not designed around them, and they are consequently among the least served people in one of the world’s largest refugee settlements.
The design followed directly from what that exclusion produces: no literacy to trade on, no marketable skill, health needs — mental and sexual — that go unaddressed because asking about them is unsafe, and no practical grounding in how to stay safe day to day. The project treated all four as one problem rather than four, because for these young people they function as one.
Alongside the training ran a second effort, on the reasoning that being unseen is itself part of the harm: making these young people’s circumstances, and their own account of what they need, visible to those with the standing to respond.
What the project set out to do
Basic and technical education. Build literacy and communication skills in Bengali and English, alongside practical handicraft training with genuine earning potential.
Safety. Equip participants with practical personal safety techniques for a setting where their exposure to harm is higher than that of those around them.
Social acceptance. Increase the standing of gender-diverse young people within their own community and before the institutions serving it.
Mental health protection. Build awareness of mental health and the means to seek support — a need that camp services rarely reach for this group at all.
Sexual health and HIV prevention. Deliver sexual health awareness aimed at reducing HIV prevalence among a group with almost no safe route to accurate information.
What the project achieved in numbers
Four components
Preparation and Community Consent
Before anything else, the project manager travelled to Ukhia, identified the specific settlement, met community leaders, local organisations and trainers, and secured the permissions the work required from local administration. Participants were then identified through those community relationships rather than open advertisement — the only method that reaches people at the margins of a settlement, and the only one appropriate where being identified publicly carries its own risk.
Two Months of Training
Three trainers delivered a two-month programme to seventy participants across five strands: reading and writing in Bengali and English; handicraft skills with practical earning potential; mental health awareness; sexual health awareness including HIV prevention; and personal safety techniques. The combination was deliberate — a skill without literacy is hard to trade on, and neither is much use to someone who is unwell, uninformed about their own health, or unsafe.
Assessment and Completion
An assessment at the end of the training measured what participants had actually gained, followed by formal recognition of completion. In a setting where achievement is rarely documented, being able to say “I completed this” carries weight beyond the certificate itself.
Exhibition and Awareness Campaign
Three visual artists worked with participants to produce an exhibition depicting the precariousness of gender-diverse life in the settlement and setting out the community’s own rights demands — shown to community members, government officials, human rights organisations, NGO workers and diplomatic representatives, an audience with the standing to act on what they saw. An accompanying campaign of one short film, three articles and five photo works carried the same material to a wider public online.
The change it leaves behind
This was a small grant of three months, delivered far from the organisation’s home district, in one of the most operationally difficult environments in Bangladesh. What it established was that a modest, carefully prepared intervention can reach people whom far larger humanitarian programmes routinely miss — gender-diverse young people at the edge of a displaced community, hardest to find precisely because they have the least standing within it, and least likely to be reached by any service that requires them to identify themselves to access it.
- ✓Preparation is most of the work: the time spent building relationships with community leaders before any training began is what made participation possible at all.
- ✓Skills, health and safety belong together: teaching a trade to someone who is unwell, isolated or in danger addresses only a fraction of what stands between them and a livelihood.
- ✓Visibility is a form of protection: bringing officials and organisations into a room to see these young people’s circumstances did what no report would have.
- ✓Reach beyond the home district: the project extended Noboprobhaat Foundation’s work from northern Bangladesh into a humanitarian setting, building experience the organisation carried into its later crisis response work.
The young people hardest to find are hardest to find precisely because they have the least standing in the community around them.