‘I try to keep myself busy’: Working online in the world’s largest refugee camp

Some Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh are earning money as online freelancers, but limited internet and electricity as well as banking restrictions make this an uphill battle, while conservative gender norms punish women for trying to do the same.

By JESMIN PAPRI | FRONTIER

After days of heavy rain, water was seeping into Anisul Mustafa’s rickety bamboo and tarpaulin shelter. But as the dirt floor turned to mud, he remained focused on his laptop and phone. 

The 22-year-old refugee had a job to do, editing a workout video for a client in faraway Australia for US$30. However, his biggest problem was not the early monsoon weather but the painfully slow mobile internet connection as he struggled to send the finished file.

“My top priority was to deliver the video to the client on time even when my shelter was flooded. If I miss a deadline, they might not hire me again. I can’t always explain that I live in a refugee camp or describe the challenges I face here,” he told Frontier on that day in early June.

Anisul is one of about a million Rohingya living in a vast complex of 34 overcrowded camps in eastern Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district, the largest concentration of refugees in the world.

These refugees have been fleeing persecution over the border in Myanmar’s Rakhine State for decades. However, more than 750,000 of them were pushed into Bangladesh by a brutal military operation in 2017 in which thousands were killed.

Anisul fled his village in northern Rakhine’s Maungdaw Township, along with his parents and six siblings, in September that year after Myanmar soldiers set their house on fire. They managed to cross the border after two days of hiding in the forest, but others were not so lucky.

“Ten of our neighbours tried to escape to Bangladesh by boat, but the Myanmar military opened fire and sank the boat,” he said. “They were shot and drowned in the river. These memories are impossible to forget.”

Anisul now lives in one of the camps with his parents, two younger brothers, his wife, and his one-year-old son. He had completed grade 10 in Myanmar but took learning into his own hands in Bangladesh, using the internet on his phone.

He taught himself video editing via YouTube tutorials in 2020 while working part-time on a project run by a non-government organisation. The job gave him access to a computer, and that year he saved enough money to buy his own laptop. He then began freelancing and offering his services on Instagram, earning just $20 for his first assignment.

Last year, Anisul launched Rohingya Creative Productions with his work partner Sadeq Hossain, who arrived in Bangladesh in 2017 from Buthidaung Township, also in northern Rakhine. They offer services including graphic design, translation and video editing, and the business has grown to the point where they earn about 50,000 Bangladeshi taka ($410) per month. Their clients are from around the world and the work is mostly in English, which Anisul had learned in Myanmar but improved via a course in the camps.

He said that despite his gains, “There are obstacles in this work. Rohingya refugees are not allowed electricity [from the Bangladeshi grid] or Wi-Fi. We have to rely on the mobile network for internet, which is very unstable.” 

Notwithstanding these difficulties, there are few other opportunities for refugees. Desperation has driven thousands of them to pay smugglers large sums to take dangerous illegal boat journeys to Malaysia or elsewhere. Anisul therefore feels fortunate to be doing his online work, saying, “Freelancing has made my life a lot easier than that of other refugees.” 

Creating content in the camps

With the Bangladeshi government excluding refugees from its school system, NGOs and United Nations agencies have provided some schooling and vocational training in the camps. However, most Rohingya refugees have received little if any formal education and lack the skills for the work done by Anisul and Sadeq.

But while unusual, they are not alone. Frontier spoke to 12 refugees doing freelance jobs online, ranging from graphic design to journalism and social media content creation, and they said there were at least 150 of them doing similar work in the camps. However, deeply conservative gender norms mean they are almost entirely male.

Residents of the camps are banned from formal employment, but a Bangladeshi refugee official told Frontier on condition of anonymity that there is no explicit ban on online work, which would be difficult to police anyway.

Most of these freelancers learned video editing via YouTube on their phone. That was the case with Rohel Khan, a 16-year-old rapper and content creator. His Facebook page Rohingya Music Video has about 83,000 followers, while his TikTok and YouTube channels each have around 43,000.

Rohel Khan arrived in Bangladesh with his parents in 2017 when he was just eight years old, after fleeing a military assault on their village in Maungdaw.

“I was just a child back then, but I still vividly remember our home being burned down and people being shot right before our eyes. Somehow, my parents managed to escape with us and bring us safely to this place,” he told Frontier

A student in an informal school for Rohingya refugees run by the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, the world’s largest NGO, he said schools like his encourage children to pursue creative activities like art and music.

After winning a local rap competition in the camps in 2021, Rohel began uploading his music to social media and was encouraged by the support he received. He formed a rap group with other refugees the following year and started producing content more regularly.

His songs in the Rohingya language address themes that range from romantic love to despair over the suffering and misfortunes of his people. He also produces comedic videos to entertain the community, as well as more serious content promoting the importance of education and warning against social ills.

His earnings from social media are small-scale due to the niche Rohingya audience, but there’s room for growth with several million Rohingya estimated to be spread across the world.

Similarly, 25-year-old camp resident Mohammad Ibrahim tries to combine making money with uplifting his community by creating Rohingya language public education videos for his YouTube channel MET. Standing for Motivational and Emotional Tutorial, it began in 2020 with just two people but has grown into a team of 20. The MET Facebook page now boasts 54,000 likes.

The team, who all taught themselves online, have produced videos encouraging responsible parenthood and criticising domestic violence.

He said it started as a purely altruistic project, driven by a belief that accessible online content was an effective medium for uplifting the community. Because refugees are not allowed to leave the camp, Ibrahim explained, the internet has become their primary source of both learning and entertainment, which the MET channel tries to combine.

“Most of the TV channels here are in Bengali and we don’t fully understand the language,” Ibrahim told Frontier. “So, we rely on mobile phones and the internet to watch videos and listen to music.”

But as the team’s videos have racked up hundreds of thousands of views, they’ve realised the project could also provide them with much-needed income.

“We haven’t received any support, funding or training from external sources,” Ibrahim said. “We now earn a small amount from social media [and] we’re working to grow that income by producing more content, but our primary focus remains enlightening and empowering the Rohingya community.”

This work also distracts him from the painful memories of fleeing Buthidaung with his parents. It was September 2017 and he witnessed many injured people struggling to cross the border.

“I still sometimes see those days in my dreams,” Ibrahim said. “I try to keep myself busy all the time so I don’t have to think about them.”

Barriers to entry

Although advances in technology have made their work possible, the Rohingya freelancers complain that the rise of artificial intelligence means getting assignments in fields like graphic design or translation has become much harder.

Yet, the biggest obstacles remain the lack of a regular electricity supply and poor internet connectivity in the camps. The latter has persisted despite 3G and 4G mobile services being available since 2020. Although refugees aren’t legally permitted to own SIM cards, because they lack Bangladeshi IDs, they are widespread in the camps and this ban isn’t well enforced.

“We struggle with internet and power almost daily,” Sadeq said. “I’ve missed deadlines, and some clients get so frustrated by the delays and dropped meetings that they cancel projects.”

There is no mains electricity in the camps and diesel generators are too costly for most refugees to run and maintain. Some families band together with others to install and share solar panels, but the more affordable panels can power little more than light fixtures, and even this is beyond the means of many camp residents. Solar power is also limited during the long May-to-October rainy season, prompting online freelancers to go to shops just outside the camps that have regular electricity in order to charge their devices.

Another difficulty is receiving payments, because refugees are excluded from the formal financial system.

“We often have to rely on local Bangladeshis or foreign NGO workers who are willing to help because we cannot open a bank account in Bangladesh,” Rohel said.

Meanwhile, for women refugees trying to follow the example of these overwhelmingly male freelancers, traditional attitudes are a far greater barrier.

Sabikun Nahar experienced this first hand. The 21-year-old camp resident used to make and present public education videos for a Facebook page called Rohingya Human Rights Network, her content ranging from community welfare to women’s rights. The page owners paid her for each video, and some of the clips were viewed more than 100,000 times.

She dreamed of starting her own page and withstood the initial criticism from community members, who questioned whether a woman should be speaking publicly at all.

She had weathered such attitudes before, having worked with several NGOs in a community where few women do professional work. Unlike many girls her age, she also resisted early marriage. That too has brought criticism. “Because I’m still unmarried, people talk,” she said with a small laugh.

But her videos would soon have graver consequences. One night a group of around 20 to 30 men, their faces covered, came to her home and shouted threats. “They told me this kind of work isn’t for women, that I was ruining the camp’s environment,” she told Frontier. The men told her that if she continued, “it won’t end well for you”.

The harassment didn’t stop there. She said people created several fake social media accounts in her name and used them to post disturbing and inappropriate content, and that although she went outside in her camp wearing a niqab to obscure her identity, she was sometimes recognised and mocked. “They would repeat things I had said in my videos …. to humiliate me,” she said.

Sabikun soon stopped appearing in online videos and the harassment immediately decreased. “I still give voiceovers sometimes,” she said, “but the views aren’t like they used to be”. She said she could deal with the hateful comments, “but when they came to my house, I got really scared. I don’t want to put my family’s safety at risk.”

Sabikun doesn’t know who the men were, but she believes their intentions were clear: “They didn’t want to see Rohingya women move forward.”

But she’s determined to keep producing some content, even while keeping a lower profile. “When I make awareness content, I get my message to people,” she said. “That means a lot to me. Some people still message me to say they’re inspired by what I’ve done. When I hear that I think, no matter what anyone says, I want to keep going.”

‘My voice can still be heard’

But although Rohingya men don’t have to contend with the prejudice faced by Sabikun, the internet can still expose them to harm. 

For instance, groups of teenagers and young men in the camps are often seen gambling on online platforms such as 1xBet. Several refugee youths told Frontier that with few work opportunities and nowhere to go, online betting has become increasingly popular, both as a form of entertainment and a largely illusory means of earning money. This phenomenon, and its dire consequences, is the subject of one of Rohel’s videos on social media, where the young rapper warns that it leads to financial, social and mental ruin.

Most forms of gambling have long been illegal in Bangladesh, but this year the government passed a new cybersecurity law that specifically outlaws online betting and has launched an accompanying crackdown. The refugee youths said that police have been arresting Rohingya in the crackdown and only release them after hefty fines are paid.

Yet, at the same time, getting online can lead refugees away from more harmful behaviour.

Asif Munier, former national programme officer at the UN’s International Organization for Migration, said it was important to engage Rohingya youth in productive activities to prevent violent crime in the camps, which has spiralled in recent years with the rise in armed Rohingya gangs.

“If young people are engaged in [online] freelancing or similar work, they won’t need to leave the camps, something the government should consider from a security perspective,” he told Frontier.

He also called for expanding internet access for the refugees, which would require investment in infrastructure. “We now have the ability to monitor how the internet is used,” he said, referring to government surveillance. “It’s time to rethink facilitating internet use.”

Munier also said refugees should be given access to legal employment and digital skills training. “With government approval, NGOs could empower refugees with skills they can use now and carry with them if they return home or move to third countries,” he said.

In the meantime, online work gives meaning to the lives of refugees like Nur Mostafa.

The 25-year-old self-taught journalist fled Rakhine in August 2017, at the height of the crackdown by the Myanmar military, and now anonymously contributes written news reports, photos, and videos to various media outlets in Bangladesh. He has found ways around the obstacles of working in the camps, using the Wi-Fi connection of a Bangladeshi friend and receiving payments through that friend’s mobile bank account.

“Even if I can’t use my name, don’t have internet of my own, and can’t receive payments directly, my voice can still be heard,” he said. “That’s what keeps me going.”

Jesmin Papri is a Dhaka-based freelance journalist covering diplomacy, labour, migration, human rights, climate change and gender inequality, and is a fellow at Rest of World and the Earth Journalism Network.