January 6, 2026 – Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh

She walked for fifteen days through the jungle, fleeing gunfire and burning villages during what should have been a holy day of celebration. Like more than one million Rohingya refugees, she arrived in Bangladesh’s sprawling Cox’s Bazar camps with nothing—no possessions, no safety, no clear future.

Today, at 27, she leads four community groups comprising 40 women and adolescent girls. She conducts household visits, documents cases of gender-based violence, and runs weekend awareness sessions through a network she built herself called “Rohingya Women Empower.” She doesn’t wait for permission. She identifies needs and creates solutions.

This isn’t a story about survival. It’s a story about strategic organizing under impossible conditions.

Understanding Changes Everything

“I got married for my safety,” she explains plainly, describing a reality countless refugee women face. “But it was when I joined UN Women that I truly found my path, working to support Rohingya women and girls. I understand what they are going through because I’ve lived it too.”

That lived experience isn’t just emotional connection—it’s tactical intelligence. She knows which households need visits, which women will open their doors, which topics require careful navigation, and which cases demand immediate action. In 2024 alone, gender volunteers in her network facilitated 5,652 referrals to essential services and reached nearly 18,000 women with protection and empowerment messaging.

These aren’t abstractions. Each number represents a woman who got information she needed, accessed a service that could change her trajectory, or found the courage to speak about violence she’d been enduring in silence.

Building Networks in the Margins

The camps aren’t safe. Security deteriorates regularly. She and fellow volunteers face threats because of their work. Still, she continues—including weekends and emergencies—because she’s not operating alone. She’s part of a network of 53 gender volunteers (27 women, 26 men) across six camps who collectively lead 203 community groups.

This infrastructure matters. Individual activists can be silenced, intimidated, or overwhelmed. Networks distribute risk, share knowledge, and sustain momentum when individuals face setbacks. She learned this through training on behavioral change and gender-based violence prevention, but she’s applying it with the strategic thinking of someone who knows resources are limited and threats are real.

“In the beginning, I didn’t know how to find solutions,” she recalls. “But after receiving training from Gender Field Officers, I began to feel confident.”

Confidence wasn’t the end goal—it was the foundation for action. Within six months, she became what organizers call a “community mobilizer,” the person others turn to for information, support, and pathways to services.

The Personal is Strategic

Her work involves handling sensitive cases—often gender-based violence—with both confidentiality and compassion. “It’s emotionally challenging, but building trust is essential,” she explains. “As a Gender Volunteer, I carefully refer and follow up on cases to ensure women receive the help they need.”

This is sophisticated case management happening in one of the world’s most resource-constrained environments. She’s tracking referrals, following up, building relationships with service providers, and maintaining confidentiality—all skills that formal social workers train years to develop. She’s doing it while living in the same precarious conditions as the women she serves.

And she’s not just responding to crises. She’s trying to prevent them through education and awareness. The “Rohingya Women Empower” network runs weekend sessions on gender messaging, human rights, and women’s empowerment. Education becomes protection when women understand their rights and know where to turn for help.

What Women Need

“We’ve spoken with our Camp-in-Charge, but we need more female CiCs,” she states directly. “Women need safe spaces where we can gather, speak freely, and learn. In places like Shanti Khana, we acquire valuable skills, including education and sewing, which bring us peace and purpose. Women understand each other—we share, listen, and support one another.”

She’s not asking for charity. She’s demanding infrastructure: female leadership in camp management, dedicated spaces for women to organize, and access to education and skill-building. These aren’t luxuries—they’re prerequisites for safety, autonomy, and future opportunities.

Shanti Khana—the “House of Peace,” a UN Women-supported multi-purpose women’s center—provides what she describes: a space where women can gather without surveillance, learn skills that create economic possibility, and build the relationships that form the foundation of collective action.

Refugee-Led Solutions Work

The refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar represent one of the world’s largest and most protracted displacement crises. More than one million people, having fled persecution and violence in Myanmar since 2017, remain in limbo—unable to return home safely and unable to fully integrate into Bangladesh. The international response has been massive, but solutions designed far from the camps often fail to address daily realities.

This is why refugee-led organizing matters. She knows which messages resonate, which approaches build trust, which timing works for women managing household responsibilities alongside everything else. She’s not implementing someone else’s theory—she’s applying her own analysis, informed by her experience and the ongoing feedback from women in her community groups.

With support from the governments of Australia and Switzerland, this network of gender volunteers reached nearly 17,000 Rohingya women and almost 900 women from host communities in 2024, including over 1,000 women with disabilities. But the work isn’t happening because of donor funding—it’s happening because women like her refuse to accept that displacement means powerlessness. See more stories of displaced women building power

Resistance as Daily Practice

Every household visit is an act of resistance. Every awareness session challenges norms that keep women isolated and vulnerable. Every referral she facilitates is a small redistribution of power—connecting a woman to resources and information that might otherwise remain inaccessible.

She doesn’t describe her work in these terms. She talks about trust, about follow-up, about making sure women get help. But underneath the practical language is a clear understanding: change happens through persistent, strategic action by people closest to the problems being solved.

The camps remain dangerous. The Rohingya remain stateless. The future remains uncertain. But within those constraints, women are organizing, learning, teaching, protecting each other, and building the networks that make survival possible and transformation conceivable.

She’s not waiting for someone else to fix things. She’s building power, one conversation and one connection at a time.

For her protection, the woman’s name has been withheld. Her work continues.

The WVoice is the digital publication of Women’s Voices Now, a 501(c)3 non-profit using film to drive positive social change that advances women’s and girls’ rights globally.