As we enter our third year of collaboration with UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, Here I Am Studio is pleased to expand our shared commitment to digital gender inclusion. Together, we are building a global learning system that strengthens the digital agency, safety, and leadership of refugee-led, women-led, and community-based organisations – ensuring they can access the tools they need to participate and innovate in digital spaces, wherever they are.
Across 2023 and 2024, the Digital Gender Inclusion and Innovation Bootcamps that Here I Am developed and delivered alongside UNHCR Innovation demonstrated what is possible when grassroots leaders receive practical, context-aware tools to navigate digital spaces, design solutions, and protect women and girls online.
Alumni – predominantly women leaders of community-based organisations – have developed safer digital practices, launched community-led digital initiatives, and reinforced protection responses in some of the world's most complex environments.
2025 Marks a New Chapter of Scale and Inclusion
The first two years of the Bootcamp showed strong impact but also revealed a structural barrier: many women-led and refugee-led organisations who needed this learning most could not participate due to connectivity constraints, limited time, or the realities of displacement.
The 2025 programme responds directly to this. The Bootcamp will transition into a global, modular e-learning course available in English, Arabic, French, and Spanish and supported by live virtual learning sessions. All materials will be publicly accessible and free of charge, opening the door to organisations that have historically been excluded from formal learning systems.This ensures that a woman leading a community organisation in a low-bandwidth, high-mobility environment can learn safely and in her own time, in the language that works for her.
By shifting to a multilingual, low-bandwidth, modular model, we can reach far more learners – especially women balancing caregiving, mobility, and safety constraints – while keeping the programme firmly rooted in the lived experiences of the communities it is designed to serve.
A Co-Creation Model Led by Communities
To scale impact without compromising relevance, the 2025 programme will be designed and delivered through a rigorous, community-led co-creation model developed by Here I Am Studio.
This approach moves beyond consultation to meaningful collaboration with refugee-led and women-led organisations, ensuring the course is shaped by the people who will ultimately use and facilitate it.
The programme is grounded in four co-creation pillars:
- Inclusion and representation
Co-creation begins with refugee-led, women-led, and community-based organisations. Lived experience drives design decisions, supported by multilingual and low-bandwidth participation. - Human-centred design and ethics
Empathy, consent, iteration, and participant safety guide all communication, content review, and decision-making. - Shared ownership and recognition
Co-creators receive co-authorship credit, certification, and visibility. This shared ownership strengthens quality, accountability, and long-term relevance. - Accessibility and flexibility
The model is mobile-first, offline-ready, and designed for low-connectivity contexts. Live sessions are optional, ensuring participation is feasible within real-life constraints.
This approach ensures that every exercise, every language and every learning moment reflects the realities, voices and leadership of the communities it serves.
A Commitment to Scale and Localisation
To reinforce our commitment, Here I Am Studio is match-funding the 2025 programme. This supports deeper co-creation, stronger localisation pathways, and more durable access for communities living on the margins of digital systems.
At the heart of this partnership is a principle we share with UNHCR:
Refugee-led and women-led organisations are not the beneficiaries of digital innovation – they are the drivers of it.
The 2025 programme is designed to amplify that leadership at scale, building an ethical, multilingual, accessible learning system grounded in lived experience.
Together with UNHCR Innovation and community leaders worldwide, we are building a future where digital inclusion is not a privilege, but a foundation for protection, leadership, and gender equality.
