were running a small shop selling food and drinks in the camps, working as a paid ‘volunteer’8 for an NGO or UN agency and daily cash for work (such as construction in the camps). Volunteers for NGOs earned between 250 and 400 BDT ($3–$4.75) per day, and undertook duties such as keeping drains clean, food distribution, filling water tanks and maintaining latrines. Most of those who worked lived off a combination of aid and their earnings. Five women we interviewed worked for NGOs as volunteers (earning between 6,000 and 12,000 BDT ($70–$140) per month doing work such as enumeration) or doing cash for work (250 BDT ($3) per day doing manual labour in the camps). One woman, a 27-year-old mother of six in Kutupalong, learned how to sew as a child in Myanmar and had recently been given a sewing machine by an NGO. She was capable of sewing all kinds of clothing, but struggled to earn 100 BDT ($1.20) a day because people in her area had no money to buy clothes. She said if a company placed an order she would be able to run a viable business. If you train our young women in their house about tailoring it would be better for them’. 4.2.3  Men and women’s views on Rohingya women working Men’s reluctance towards women working outside the home does not mean that they do not want women to work and generate an income. While both challenge traditional gender norms, most men were receptive to the idea of women generating an income as long as it was through home-based work such as sewing. The economic situation in the camps means that, by necessity, more women have become breadwinners and are undertaking non-traditional work, and it was evident that displacement had begun to change some minds about work and gender norms.9 For one man, his family structure (wife and three female children) and circumstances in Bangladesh had begun to shift his views, and he accepted that circumstances in Bangladesh were such that it would be better if women could work. Even so, women’s increasing economic role in the household is causing friction (Ripoll: 2018: 2). Female volunteers working for NGOs in the camps face harassment, intimidation and sometimes violence as a result of their increased participation in employment outside the home. We asked both men and women what they thought about Rohingya women working in Bangladesh. Most men and women had what they described as a ‘conservative mindset’ about women working: most women did not want to work outside the home, nor did men want them to, and some did not allow it. One 34-year-old married woman in Kutupalong said ‘husbands don’t allow us to work in any office because there are men and we are not allowed to work next to a man. If we can be a teacher they will allow us … because it is in the home and also because it is just with children. Men think that the women will become shameless if they go outside and they won’t want to live inside the curtain and be covered’. Their views were linked to purdah (the practice of female seclusion, based on social and religious beliefs) and expectations of women as caretakers. As one 20-year-old father of three in Balukali said: ‘We are conservative-minded … the woman has no right to go out to do any job their only right is to stay in the house and after marry then go to the groom’s house. Addressing these challenges will require responding to the limited receptivity among men and women for women to work outside the home,10 and to build livelihoods training and programming from this starting point. One way to do this would be to explore homebased businesses (which some NGOs are already doing) and links to viable markets, or for male and female ‘champions’ within the refugee community to sensitise others to potential opportunities for different types of work. Programmatic strategies should seek to promote women's economic opportunities with a combination of other interventions: violence prevention, women's leadership promotion, and tackling policies and social norms that deny women their rights to assets and resources. It may also be useful to look at the experiences of Rohingya people, including women, in other countries the region. For example, norms around women working have changed for female Rohingya refugees over the course of protracted displacement in Malaysia (Wake, 2014). 8 As noted in HPG research on capacity and complementarity in the response to Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh (Wake and Bryant, 2018: 8), the title and terms of such ‘volunteer’ work are not without criticism: ‘While it is positive that refugees can contribute their capacity to the response – many working alongside Bangladeshi colleagues and contributing equally – the title of volunteer (rather than staff) and low stipend fails to adequately reflect their contributions. More broadly, many refugees worked for UN agencies and INGOs in Myanmar, and have other valuable skills, experience and capacity that are currently not being utilised in the response’. 9 See Goldsmith and Karim (2019) for further discussion. 10 We acknowledge that hypothetical questions about livelihoods can be challenging and it is difficult to assess how receptive refugees may ultimately be to women working outside the home – refugees’ receptivity may change were concrete employment options available. Humanitarian Policy Group 19