I am a third-year PhD student with a research interest in migration and health. My PhD aims to explore the safety, gender, and health and well-being concerns of adolescent Rohingya refugees and asylum-seekers in Malaysia, taking a youth-centered participatory and collaborative approach. To facilitate ethical, safe, and meaningful youth participation, this required consulting local child protection organisations and refugee leaders throughout the research.

Working with a community-based co-researcher, we first explored what safety means to Rohingya girls and worked with Rohingya girls to organise their Safe Space community event. We then established a mixed-gender refugee youth advisory committee to inform which issues to focus on. This involved collaborating with a refugee youth-led organisation to deliver capacity-buliding workshops about becoming a change agent. Next, youth advisors' input will inform qualitative case studies to understand common life trajectories and challenges facing Rohingya adolescents in Malaysia.

These Malaysia-based qualitative findings will then be triangulated with secondary analysis of survey data from Rohingya adolescents based in Cox's Bazar about issues prioritised by the youth advisors, to compare differences between urban versus camp settings. It is hoped that the findings will inform gender- and context-sensitive programming together with refugee adolescents.