Cool Ideas for a Long, Hot Summer: Refugee Communication Networks
In our miniseries Cool Ideas for a Long, Hot Summer, we’re working with Arizona State University’s Global Futures Lab to highlight bold ideas about how to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
On this episode, host Kimberly Quach is joined by ASU assistant professor Faheem Hussain to learn about how Rohingya refugees are using social technologies and what they can teach everyone about communicating in disasters. Hussain is a researcher whose trajectory was changed when he visited a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh. There, he learned how the community uses a combination of online and offline technologies to create networks to share information in response to disasters.
Resources
- Infrastructuring Hope: Solidarity, Leadership, Negotiation, and ICT among the Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh
- Gendered effects of climate change and health inequities among forcibly displaced populations: Displaced Rohingya women foster resilience through technology
Transcript
Kimberly Quach: Welcome to The Ongoing Transformation, a podcast from Issues in Science and Technology. Issues is a quarterly journal published by the National Academy of Sciences and by Arizona State University. I’m Kimberly Quach, Digital Engagement Editor at Issues. On Cool ideas for a Long Hot Summer, we’re working with ASU’s Global Futures Lab to highlight cool ideas about how to respond to climate change. On this episode, I’m joined by assistant professor Faheem Hussain to learn about how Rohingya refugees are using social technologies. Faheem shares how his research trajectory was changed by a visit to a Rohingya refugee camp and explains how the Rohingya are creating communication networks to respond to disasters. Faheem, welcome!
Faheem Hussain: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Quach: So before we get into the rest of our interview, I wanted to ask a little bit about you. I know that your background is in telecommunications, engineering, public policy. So how did you get involved with the refugee community?
Hussain: The refugee work has been since 2017. I was not planning to do it, but when I saw the Rohingya, that exodus of them escaping the atrocities from Myanmar to Bangladesh crossing the border, I got a ticket, went there, started seeing the disaster firsthand. And that entirely changed my research trajectory to look into the challenges, aspirations, and innovations of people on the run when it comes to access to education, access to communication using digital technologies.
I got a ticket, went there, started seeing the disaster firsthand. And that entirely changed my research trajectory.
Quach: So could you tell me more about the Rohingya? Who are they and why are they being displaced?
Hussain: The way the state of… the Federation of Burma happened and then the military junta now renamed it as Myanmar, there are many ethnicities. And Rohingya are one of those ethnicities. But unfortunately somewhere in mid-eighties or early eighties, they had a new constitution and Rohingyas lost their rights to citizenship. And afterwards, gradually, they lost their access to resources, access to land, access to ownership of many other things. And that’s how they were super marginalized within their own country. And they have been gradually leaving or escaping that country since late eighties, early nineties. And majority of the Rohingyas unfortunately, are now living in Bangladesh as refugees or unofficial refugees.
Quach: How are they impacted by climate change and our long hot summers?
Hussain: Bangladesh is already one of the worst affected country or the region when it comes to climate change. And Rohingyas are right now based in Cox’s Bazar area which has one of the longest uninterrupted sea beach in the world. As a young Bangladeshi when I used to go to the sea beaches of Cox’s Bazar when I was very young, and now when I go there as a researcher, I see how the sea level rose and how it affected the communities there. There are so many extreme events there.
And the Rohingyas primarily lived in the region where there were national forests. And now there’s no green whatsoever. They had to cut down all the trees. And that totally affected in terms of the natural resources and how you are acquiring it, how you are accessing it. And it also made the whole ecosystem of food industry there and agriculture there off balance because the access to the natural resources from the host community is also at peril because of their presence there. So overall, it’s a huge mess.
Quach: So it sounds like a difficult situation not just for the Rohingya but for the host population. And they’re sort of coming into conflict, not just over climate, but culturally and other things. And one thing that I think you mentioned is that we wouldn’t think of this population as innovative in technology, but they actually are using it in really cool ways. Could you tell me about that?
They have their own parallel alternative internet, the network to communicate with each other.
Hussain: Yes. So my main research, the thing that I’ve been documenting since 2017, when the latest exodus happened, is to look into how they’re using digital technologies. Now by default, we think that our languages have alphabets and we have access to internet, the basic access, and we can communicate and connect with each other. But then what really fascinated me as a researcher is Rohingyas do not have any recognized written form. So they do not have alphabets. So that kind prohibits them from accessing the digital technologies using their own languages in a text format. So that’s very important when you are talking about designing things. And to make things worse, technically Rohingyas are not allowed to have legal access to mobile phones in their host community in Bangladesh. They need IDs and whatnot, which they do not have. And the internet access, the quality of service within the camp areas where we are talking about 1.3 million population, it’s a big city per se, the internet is very, very poor, the service is very poor, the connectivity is very poor, availability is very poor. And they pay a lot of price to get whatever service they can have. So overall, that makes things very challenging.
But what we have seen is their resilience in terms of coming up with offline communication. They have their own parallel alternative internet, the network to communicate with each other. They have their mobile shops where they repair things, they exchange the content, and also it’s a hub of exchanging information. And during COVID time as well, it was a center for people accessing health information and advisory in their own languages. So that was fascinating. So these are the things I’ve been looking into to see how people communicate in environment where things are challenging.
Quach: What sorts of innovations are they pioneering? It’s pretty difficult to use any sort of technology if you don’t have access to written language.
Hussain: It’s a very audio-based conversation. So what they do, they used WhatsApp and there are several other— lesser known in our part of the world—voice communication apps they use, where you need very low bandwidth to communicate through video and audio. So they do offline messaging. So whenever someone goes somewhere, they download those things and then come down and listen to those messages. And some of the messages are also being transferred through the USB drives and then can be transferred from phone to phone using offline network. They do it by creating an ad hoc network of Bluetooth and whatnot. Or they transfer it through the laptops of the mobile repair shops. So that way they communicate.
Personal touch is important in terms of validation because there is a lot of misinformation/disinformation there as well. So many of the information are getting first validated by the local elders.
But more importantly, what we have seen—and I found it very important—is that personal touch is important in terms of validation because there is a lot of misinformation/disinformation there as well. So many of the information are getting first validated by the local elders in a certain subcamp and only then they’re disseminating those information. Or if there are some false information, there have been a manual mechanism where they verify it through in-person conversations and whatnot. So what we have seen there is the human connectivity per se, that helps some of the gaps that has been there because of the lack of infrastructure when it comes from digital services.
Quach: So that’s really interesting. I think there’s a lot of lessons we could take from this. We kind of imagine it as being an issue for people far away, but in this country we’ve seen many situations where natural disasters have brought really low connectivity periods for us, like for example, during Hurricane Katrina, a lot of these lessons could be used or our current situation with rampant misinformation, disinformation, how we could kind of use those lessons. For our listeners, what are things you think that would be really useful from our Western standpoint that we could learn from these communities and implement in the U.S.?
Hussain: What I have seen seen, it’s always the human power and human lives and how they do things at the personal level. The technology comes secondary. I think that’s very important for to look into. I have worked with my local partner, Young Power in Social Action, who are officially a partner of ASU when it comes to research. And through them I worked with an amazing program called Voice of Palong. This VOP or Voice of Palong, it’s is a collection of volunteers from both the refugee community and the host community. And these are very young kids who turn to be activists. They’re very advanced user when it comes to mobile phones and internet. And they work together to make sure that the information they communicate to the community are valid. But at the same time, while they do it, they created a lot of good reputation of themselves. So the people trust them.
It’s always the human power and human lives and how they do things at the personal level. The technology comes secondary.
And then what they do is if something bad happens or something urgent happens, they’re the ones first get the messages or information from the affected people and then they pass it. So the validation becomes easier because the recognition of them as valid sources are evident. So it goes both ways. Not only they’re effectively disseminating information, they’re also effectively collecting information from the people. So in that way, the services that can be designed by the organizations working with the refugees and host communities, they have a better sense of idea of what the people really need. So it’s not a top-down approach, it’s a bottom-up approach. And technology is just a secondary part of it. To answer your question, this is something that we can definitely learn and try to focus on when disaster happens here because sometimes I think we are overly and overtly dependent on our technological infrastructure and not pay a lot of attention and knowing the faces behind those.
Quach: Yeah, that’s definitely true. I think that’s a great takeaway that technology and infrastructure isn’t just our things with circuits, but it’s also community building, it’s trust building. All of those things are important innovations that we should keep in mind.
Hussain: There’s tension on access to resources, and this is one of the things that we do not see in the conversation when we talk about displacement, when we talk about migration, that not only the people who are getting displaced are affected, it’s also the people who are being host can’t have huge access to resources. Especially when we are based in Arizona, we definitely see the tension in the borders. What we have seen, the success story of VOP in making those conflict resolutions by working together by younger generation, and then look beyond just some specific projects.
So that really helped the VOP to establish or looking forward to establish a good information, valid information network when it comes to early warning systems, when the flash floods happens, or there are issues with cyclone warning systems because is very much vulnerable towards that. And we have seen some huge success without much investment there. So this is one of the future direction of my research to elaborate on it more, to dig deeper and see if we infuse more better technology with more effective human connection, whether that can really help when it comes to adaptation of climate change there and do something better for the environment.
Quach: Well, thank you. This was fantastic to learn about innovation in such a…I think you’ve called them one of the most oppressed populations, but they are innovating in such interesting ways and show incredible resilience in the face of not just of climate challenges, but a whole host of challenges.
Hussain: Yeah. Yeah. And I hope that as people are struggling all over the world, and it’s not something us versus them, the displacement happens all over. We inherit the world in a similar manner. So climate change does not see boundaries and the geographies or the passports. So I think the knowledge should be flowed freely in both ways, and we can definitely learn from the affected people.
Climate change does not see boundaries and the geographies or the passports. So I think the knowledge should be flowed freely in both ways, and we can definitely learn from the affected people.
Quach: Check our show notes to learn more about Faheem Hussain’s work, the Rohingya refugee crisis, and how to create more effective human connections. And please subscribe to The Ongoing Transformation wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks to our audio engineer Shannon Lynch. I’m Kimberly Quach, digital engagement editor at Issues in Science and Technology. Join us next week for our final episode of our miniseries. We’ll talk to Melissa K. Nelson about problems in the food system and how utilizing indigenous practices can help.