Bangladesh: Innocent Eyes

• In Event: Uplifting Young Children’s Voices for Social Change

Proposal

Since 2017, millions of Rohingya people from Myanmar were forced to flee to Bangladesh (UNHCR, 2024). BRAC, a Bangladeshi organization, worked with Bangladeshi filmmaker Elizabeth Da Costa and ChildArise to use a participatory research and storytelling approach to engage Rohingya refugees and Bangladeshi host communities in a film about their experiences from Myanmar to the Rohingya refugee camps. With the use of technology such as Go-pros and video cameras, the partners (including the children in the camps) produced a short documentary film called “Innocent Eyes.”

The presentation will share the process of identifying and engaging young children and families, in Cox’s Bazaar in this project. It will highlight how they played active roles along with the filmmakers and NGO partners to make a film that shares the positive and negative aspects of their journeys and lives in Bangladesh. The presentation will also share tips using technology for doing participatory work with refugee children and how to then support children to be social change agents in their own communities.

Author

• Sweta Shah, The Brookings Institution