Community-Based Research in Fragile Contexts: Reflections From Rohingya Refugee Camps in Cox’s Bazar,Bangladesh

Creating an (Almost) Equal Learning Field for Community Researchers

To address the concern of limited literary skills in the English language — skills that are critical to reach a global audience — the Rohingya and Bangladeshi community researchers underwent extensive training and mentoring. The initial language training and mentoring from staff researchers had their limitations, especially with communication in English and in translating. Seeing this, we paired community researchers with advanced English language skills with those who were less proficient. The two-pronged approach created parallel spaces for community researchers to practice and build their English language skills with staff researchers and their peers.

Improving writing skills among community researchers were also emphasized. The engagement with community researchers were divided into “academic and research months.” During the academic months, community researchers were engaged in reading, workshops, and discussions to accelerate their comprehension of the research topics at hand. During the research months, participants applied their learnings to study social differences, politico-economic dynamics, and community perceptions. CRITAS course instructors also taught Bloom’s Taxonomy ² (Armstrong 2010) tools to stimulate the community researchers’ analytical thinking.

Learning While Doing; Doing While Learning

Community researchers participated in CRITAS not only as students or data enumerators but also as active researchers throughout the research cycle. Through weekly “homework” assignments, community researchers produced various knowledge documents, including interview transcripts, field notes, briefing papers, analyses, and research reports that reflect the nuanced perspectives of local residents and refugees.

The community researchers first studied the monthly topic and relevant research techniques through lectures, reading assignments, and watching videos. Next, they discussed the topic in small teams of four or five called “pods,” and submitted a set of research questions to course instructors and researchers for feedback. With guidance, the pods then developed appropriate tools to pursue their research questions. Areas of support from staff researchers included identifying sampling strategies, drafting interview and focus group questionnaires, developing surveys, and designing case studies. Following data collection, the pods analyzed their findings and produced a group analysis paper. These analyses were submitted to the authors, who then drafted the reports to share with the community researchers for final review prior to dissemination.

After participating in the interviews or surveys, community researchers were encouraged to dialogue on several critical questions in their pods and with the larger group with the instructors. The internal reflection prepared the participants for the workplace and enabled them to have a better understanding of the community, improve personal and social relationships, and address their psychological needs. For instance, the community researchers conducted a research on “Three Generation History’’ where they interviewed their family members from three different generations using storytelling methods. They reflected that their bonding with family members grew stronger and that the interviewees were happy to share their stories. The community researchers also felt enriched to have learned about their family histories. A host community researcher reflected, “I could learn from my grandfather about the time of Bangladesh Liberation War. I got to know what they faced and how they fought during the war. I did not know these stories before” (Olney, Hoque, and Ahmad, 2022). Moreover, interviewing family members scaffolded them to acquire research skills and made them confident to conduct research in the community.

Further, instead of imposing research themes, we encouraged participants to come up with their own ideas and issues that they would like to study. Staff researchers provided technical and mentoring support to learners to design their study, including developing open-ended research questions and question banks for community consultations.

Facilitating Peer-to-Peer Learning

Working separately but on parallel research assignments, researchers from the refugee community and host community prepared themselves and implemented their research skills to produce quality reports and briefs for humanitarian decision-makers. Participants met in small “pods” each week to share and interpret their findings. Each pod submitted an analysis piece to staff, who integrated these contributions into research reports. Community researchers reviewed draft reports, gathered community reactions to findings by providing verbal summaries in their own language, and helped revise and finalize written materials.

Each month, the teams focused on a different topic relevant to their lives. Monthly topics included food security, environmental studies, trafficking and migration, and ethnographic history. Research skills were taught incrementally, scaffolding the learning process of participants and mentoring them to strengthen their motivation and participation. Instructors gradually transferred responsibilities to the learners.

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors hosted “Chat Hours” via WhatsApp each week, where community researchers shared inputs from community respondents. This strategy to use “Chat Hours” emerged to mitigate information gaps between the refugee community and the humanitarian agencies. Such an approach also allowed for regular and remote engagement between community researchers and staff researchers, and helped avoid gaps in communication.

Centering Trust in Learning and Research

In response to the COVID-19 crisis, CPJ worked with dedicated and talented Rohingya community researchers and developed a “Trust Network” of community members, including Majhis (camp leaders), religious leaders, CBOs, teachers, and grassroots leaders. The resulting informal “Trust Network” included over 3,000 individuals, who agreed to participate in regular consultation on a rotating basis. Roughly 1,000 participated in these consultations each month. Community researchers covered emerging concerns and questions from these consultations over the phone each week and compiled findings and analysis in a weekly internal report sent to the authors.

It must be acknowledged how disconcerting it must be for persecuted and traumatized communities to share their experiences and stories with outsiders, including researchers who are often from outside their communities. Rohingya refugees are survivors of the most atrocious violence and most have experience repeated trauma over decades. Further, a combination of disappointment in humanitarian systems and justice and fear of potential retaliation have pushed the Rohingya people to gradually become distrustful of researchers, especially those who seem to parachute in and out of the camps. Olney and Hoque (2021) documented such a “trust gap” between refugees and humanitarians in Cox’s Bazar. The “Trust Network” approach can create a congenial, informal but secure atmosphere for community researchers and community respondents to talk and discuss sensitive and crucial issues. The approach seeks to create norms of reciprocity and a network of civic engagement, ensuring researchers remain accountable to respondents. It also empowers people in the network who pose their straightforward questions to relevant actors.

Although this “Trust Network” was born out of COVID-19 and mobility restrictions for outsiders, it continues to be an important source of information even after public health-related mobility restrictions have been lifted. Long-term, personal engagement between staff and community researchers builds community trust and familiarity with the research process. Repeated engagement between researchers and respondents also builds institutional reputability and acceptance as respondents develop awareness of the purpose, limitations, and potential impacts of research. With this trust established, more frank and nuanced feedback can be collected from the community, allowing greater insight into the topics of inquiry.

A two-way exchange between researchers and community respondents enhances the learning process and helps uncover additional areas for inquiry. However, research is often a unidirectional process in which researchers are not accountable to community respondents. From our interactions, many young refugees note interactions with enumerators and researchers, but most rarely saw the research findings or observed tangible changes following the research. Many community members are not briefed adequately on the purpose of the research. To overcome this asymmetry, we invited community respondents to share their comments, questions, and concerns. Such research and learning designs also create opportunities for respondents to learn about different topics, which can be especially valuable in settings where their access to information is otherwise limited.

How Did Our Community-Based Research Approach Create Learning Opportunities?

Community researchers benefit when enumerations are conducted as an immersive learning experience. Access to higher education is prohibited in the camps and is also limited for host community youth in Cox’s Bazar, a peripheral district of Bangladesh. The research preparation and analysis stages offer unique spaces that promote non-formal learning opportunities for youth, especially for refugees whose access to learning is strongly limited. In this process, community researchers must not only be trained on data enumeration, but also on thematic areas and concepts from different disciplines, especially the social sciences. Allowing space for community researchers to learn research theories, methodologies, and questions can facilitate learning beyond basic data enumeration. This learning can be further facilitated with intensive training on research ethics and soft research skills that can be transferred to the community researchers’ future work. CPJ was unable to provide accreditation to community researchers due to policy restrictions. However, all community researchers received training and project completion certificates to commemorate their successful work and to document their experience for their future endeavors.

Such a research approach also extends new roles to the refugee and host community youths — namely learners-students-volunteers and researchers. Many community researchers are university-aged youth, who have been systematically excluded from higher education. For many community researchers, this work was their first interaction with a university. In our interactions and conversations, community researchers often expressed their eagerness to supplement their lack of access to formal education with the non-formal learning and training opportunities we designed (CPJ 2021). This meant that course instructors and staff researchers had to extend their roles to that of mentors and teachers, which requires deep commitment and engagement outside of work for course instructors.

Beyond the course content, the authors also tried to address any gaps in reading and comprehension, especially English. Rohingya and Chittagonian are both spoken languages and do not have scripts or syllabaries. The Rohingya and Chittagonian languages to have some 70 percent in common, and the Chittagonian and Cox’s Bazar dialects have about 90 percent similarity with each other (Translators without Borders 2017). Additionally, the Rohingya people know Burmese, and host community members know Bangla. Nevertheless, language barriers in English would often hold back community researchers from active learning process through writing. To encourage learners to practice writing, the authors held “private freewriting” and “focused freewriting” ⁴ sessions. Private freewriting tools allowed learners to write continuously for a set period of time with limited concern for rhetoric, conventions, and mechanics. At other times, learners were given prompts to guide their writing. Both processes helped learners to gain confidence with their writing.

What Scope Is There for This Approach to Encourage Grassroots Change and Leadership?

Community-based research can encourage critical thinking and initiate discussions on cultural change. In 2019, CPJ rolled out a civic learning course that had a small component on gender. Although gender was not a focal area, exploring differences between sex and gender initiated unexpected and lively discussions among the community researchers, who began to unpack the extent to which they had taken cultural gender norms for granted. After a particular session on gender rights, a few male participants shared with the instructor how they had beaten their wives in the past. Without any direct prompting, the men committed to not beating their wives going ahead. The training and discussions on gender helped learners better understand how tolerance of gender-based violence and their desire to grow as peacebuilders were in conflict. In this way, these conversations and learnings did not stay limited to the “classrooms.”

Community-based experiential education and research is not a revolutionary idea. However, this approach can be an exemplary path to support refugee youth and foster their grassroots leadership in situations of protracted displacement. To help refugee youth develop their intellectual leadership, skills should be considered one of the most important and durable solutions. Such a “learner-researcher” approach can create the space for refugees to raise their own concerns and needs and, potentially, contribute to prioritizing and designing responsive research that builds their skills and helps mainstream direct community insights into humanitarian response. More can be done to reflect the priorities of refugees through research. To that end, a community-based approach that emphasizes both learning and doing can help place refugees at the center of research and amplify community needs and priorities.

Both Rohingya and host community researchers frequently raised their ambitions to learn leadership and hone their critical thinking skills to mobilize their respective communities for a better future. Many Rohingya youth aspire to study law and politics, so they can meaningfully participate in international and domestic justice mechanisms. The social sciences were largely missing in Myanmar’s curriculum. As a result, most Rohingya never studied the social sciences in their school or college.

Did We Adequately Address Inequalities Within Communities?

The community-based research approach is not without limitations. The authors often asked which voices were missing in their research. Although such an approach surfaces community voices, it still risks leaving some voices behind. Unlike random sampling, the “Trust Network” approach relied on convenient sampling, where community respondents were selected based on ease and the community researchers’ social network. This approach meant that there were some missing voices among community respondents. For example, some camps were more represented than others and the “Trust Network” had more male than female community respondents.

There are also sizable differences in the levels of education within the Rohingya community. Rohingya learners have been deprived of their civic rights, including education, job opportunities, and barrier-free movement. The Rohingya people have been historically denied access to employment in the public or corporate sectors in Myanmar, which often provided most with little incentive to pursue formal education. As a result, many prefer agriculture, farming, and fishing to school. Also, it is uncommon for Rohingya girls to attend school due to cultural restrictions. For example, school authorities in Myanmar did not allow Rohingya girls to enter the learning space without a school uniform, which was frowned upon by the Rohingya community. Families are also reluctant to continue girls’ education after puberty. Given these gendered challenges, identifying female Rohingya community researchers was challenging. The gender distribution of our predominantly male community researchers reflected this challenge. To be culturally sensitive, the authors created an exclusive learning pod for female community researchers. Some initiatives to make community researchers and their families more comfortable included providing separate spaces for female and male researchers when needed, communicating with family members and making open two-way communication constant throughout the process.

Most Rohingya community researchers did not have computers to attend online sessions, which sometimes made it difficult for them to avail electronic learning materials. Many, however, had smartphones that allowed them to join online classes and access learning materials. To ensure effective participation, the community researchers were given small amounts of mobile top-ups and data.

Refugee camp residents reside in small and often overcrowded shelters. Three to four people must typically share a small room, leaving little to no space for studying or working. As the internet connection is sometimes too weak to attend online sessions, community researchers often had to go outside their shelter to a hilltop or an open field to access the internet. ⁵ This was particularly challenging for female researchers who may face higher security risk should they have move large distances. Furthermore, during monsoon season heavy rain inundated shelters and roads. Electricity is also an issue. Rohingya refugees cannot access electricity but use solar power, struggling to recharge phones and electronic devices for learning.

There were instances where some community respondents in the “Trust Network” were not interested in talking to community researchers. Some noted not seeing changes after consultations as the reason for such reluctance. Managing expectations on large-scale change has been challenging.

Did We Really Challenge West-Centric Modes of Knowledge Production?

Our answer to this is rather mixed. This research approach allowed community researchers to take an active role throughout the research cycle — from inception to data collection to analysis — which is rather rare. Research, especially in humanitarian contexts, is often a one-directional process in which researchers have little accountability to respondents (CPJ 2022). To further amplify community voices, we invited community researchers to review the draft research papers and provide their feedback and inputs before sharing them with others. On a slightly dismaying note, such an approach is highly dependent on external funding and is reliant on the whims of the perceived needs of external communities. This makes it difficult to plan and continue such a learning and research agenda on a continuous basis. Lastly, this article was written by Bangladeshi researchers, who acknowledge their outsider positioning in the research space.