Working for an NGO as an ESL teacher from July 2025-March 2026 was the most fulfilling and meaningful work I had ever done. A break from my legal career, it was an opportunity to directly work with and learn from incredibly intelligent women who were survivors of genocide, extremist ideologies, war and poverty. However, despite the positives of this humanitarian experience, there are distressing truth about NGOs, and I witnessed abuse, negligence and exploitation first hand.
A rock and a hard place
My colleagues and I debated back and forth whether an exposé of this institution should ever be written. This is because the truth was, this place was all the majority of our students had. The Rohingya students from the camps had no legal rights in Bangladesh for studying or work, so this institution’s scholarship was the scarce opportunity any of them had to potentially experience life outside the UNHCR refugee camp. The Afghan students also couldn’t return to Afghanistan, and the rest of the Nepalese, Indigenous, and Bengali students, to mention a few, were the first in their villages to even afford an education, through this scholarship programme.
Destroying this institution, no matter how small, would be destroying an opportunity.
Although stuck between a rock and a hard place, I believe that there is no space for true NGO progress if we treat vulnerable students as decoration pieces by parading them as success stories. Behind closed doors, they are victims of institutional failures rather than victors of international funding.
The following is a breakdown of institutional failures I witnessed through the poor quality of student life, lack of medical safeguarding and rumours of sexual exploitation.
Medical negligence and lack of patient consent
The spreading of illnesses was quick because eight girls were expected to share one room, with no AC installed, despite the humid, tropical weather and constant electric outages. Although there were a few in-house infirmaries and three on-the-clock psychiatrists across all campuses, there was a serious lack of medical resources to deal with the Goliath task ahead: adequately providing for these extremely vulnerable students. Most of them had witnessed or experienced war bombings, violent deaths, sexual abuse, rape and/or domestic violence. Nearly all of my students in my first term experienced extreme PTSD and depression which I had no proper training to deal with. This became evident when I handed one of my students back her poor exam results, which led to her having such a bad panic attack she began convulsing in her seat, and then in my arms. I had to pull her onto a wheelchair and carry her down three flights of stairs. Having almost no trauma pedagogy, I realised I was out of my depth.
However, the scarce medical resources were the least of these students’ issues, because the help that was available seemed, at times, far more dangerous. Driving in the company van to
the city from KEPZ, a colleague and I were travelling with a student who began telling us a story as we crossed a certain alleyway.
She told us she couldn’t look out the window when the van drove past this place, because she had such a bad memory of that hospital. She then began to recall how she had once gone in there for check up because her stomach was aching, and woke up semi-conscious to know her stomach had been pumped without her knowing. There were people dying in beds around her and she felt so ill and scared. She then called her friends begging at least one of them to sit by her side, but they said the institution had refused them permission to leave since it was outside curfew time. She ended the story by telling us how she really thought she was going to die alone, and hence cannot forget that night.
It was common for my students and my colleagues’ students to tell us about their stomach being pumped or medical procedures done to them without their consent or knowledge. The concept of medical privacy was so unknown that it was also common for students to email their entire medical history to us teachers just to ask for a sick day, which was a huge breach of their own privacy.
The alleged student suicide
Walking to dinner with my Afghan colleagues from UNICEF in October, they asked if I wanted to visit one of their friends who had suffered a serious injury beforehand. I agreed, not thinking much of it, until they told me the girl they were visiting was the same one who had allegedly attempted to commit suicide the week before, by jumping from her dorm balcony. Completely unsure of whether I should attend her bedside after such a traumatic experience, I awkwardly huddled in the room where about ten other Afghan girls crowded around her. Her sister had kindly let us in, offering refreshments.
After everyone had said their piece, I asked the girl how she was feeling, and she replied, “I just don’t know why I did it.” I immediately rushed to tell her she didn’t need to know, or explain it to me, and it was okay. Her sister then asked, “Do you know what happened?” To which I replied that I had a brief idea.
She began discussing how there was no suicide attempt and that this was a coverup spread by the organisation’s admin, to hide what really had happened. Pulling out a Google image of some long-named medicine and zooming in on the side effects, she explained:
“My sister,” she started saying, “was put on these strong medicines, by the head of the medical team. The reason was because she began experiencing serious panic attacks and anxiety which gave her insomnia for months. It started when she was roomed with these seven girls in her first semester, who didn’t like her. The truth was, they were dating. Lesbians. Now, I don’t care about what people do with their lives, but we’re from Kabul and my sister had never seen or heard of something like that before. They could quickly tell my sister felt uncomfortable with them, and began to isolate her, play pranks on her or leave the window by her bed open so that spiders or lizards would find their way onto her face. They were agitating her so she would
eventually complain and change dorms. However, every time my sister went to complain to her head of year she was dismissed. She tried scheduling meetings with the head psychiatrist, who usually postponed or cancelled. One day she suffered a serious mental breakdown, and for four hours the psychiatrist showed up with nothing but this bottle of pills, having not done a diagnosis or healthy query. My sister began taking those pills, but they weren’t helping.
The day they doubled my sister’s dose, that was the day she went to her old balcony in a haze. Thinking she was getting into bed, she fell down seven stories without knowing she had crashed, but was lucky the only thing she broke was her leg.” One of the symptoms of that medicine was fogginess, another was suicidal tendencies.
After that, for a few months, I began to buy groceries for the sick girl and her sister on a weekly basis, visiting to check the progress. However, it was clear: her dorm was humid, worsening the girl’s infections, and the food pitiful. The strong smell of chemical paint and sawdust surrounded her room, so strongly.
It was clear that girls in this institution were often given medication without the appropriate diagnosis and this story was an example of the worst case scenario. Something the institution tried its best to not only cover up, but also used to intimidate the girls into not discussing with anyone. After I did my exit interview and explained in detail further medical abuse I witnessed to my head supervisors, the head psychiatrist also shortly left the institution. One of her fellow subordinates later told me that, allegedly, it turned out she didn’t even have a psychiatry degree, only a neuroscience one, and had no licence to be prescribing any medicines.
Sexual abuse allegations and NDAs
In a recent informal meeting with a colleague who had left the institution briefly after me, she discussed how a foreign teaching professor was allegedly fired after a student reported he kissed her in his apartment complex. This is not the first time he was accused of sexual abuse. The first time was in December, when I heard of him sexting erotic inappropriate poetry to his student. This was told to me by one of my supervisors who said it allegedly didn’t get him fired, because “he was from Harvard” and therefore priceless for the reputation of the institution.
However, this wasn’t the worst of it, and he wasn’t the only one. Having interviewed psychiatrists, students and ex-colleagues, they all told me they had been told of a sex-escorting ring within the institution that was spearheaded by the officials in charge. There was also talk of alleged sex trafficking: “Some girls who come to this institution don’t actually make it. They are herded off to some place in Dhaka, smuggled through Pakistan, where they get handed to some lady.” Though there is no material proof of this within my research and therefore this may be legally argued to be a baseless rumour, it was still shocking to me that such a rumour was commonplace knowledge amongst my senior coworkers from multiple departments.
Once I returned to London in March, I demanded a meeting with my supervisors, as well as the Board of the Directors, about the information I had gathered. Following this, my colleagues who remained in the institution told me they were all given NDAs (physically evidenced) to sign, legally binding them to never speak of their experiences, even five years after departure from the institution. My work email was also suspended, and people were told to stop contacting me. Although the foreign teaching fellows didn’t have to sign the NDAs after negotiating with our head supervisor, they were still banned from reapplying to the institution for another year, whilst all of the national admin were forced to sign it or lose their jobs.
Apparently, it was not just my meeting with the Board of Directors which prompted this, but also conversation between coworkers that the New York Times had launched an investigation into this NGO, and this was a threat they were trying to eliminate.
Workplace harassment and zero professionalism
Despite everything the students had to endure, one of the biggest hurdles to them receiving a decent education was the fact that the teachers were being pressured and harassed with constantly changing curriculums, last minute exam changes and nonsensical work expectations and pressures. The Bengali staff had it the worst. Whilst the foreign staff were extremely privileged because their complaints got listened to, platformed or resolved, I witnessed the Bengali staff getting pressured to always work more and complain less. Since most of my colleagues and myself came from Oxbridge or Ivy league universities, the leadership treated us with special consideration and often placed our opinions over that of experienced South Asian teachers, who were far older than us.
However, despite this obvious segregation, we all experienced that the constant flip-flopping of the educational structure of the institution was impossible to keep up with, and kept confusing and distressing our students; something I endlessly complained about. Teachers kept leaving or feeling overwhelmed and demoted in the toxic workplace — that hung like a gloomy cloud over our cubicles. The retention rate of this institution was less than five years, my supervisor told me.
The hard pill to swallow
The hardest pill to swallow was that, despite the allegations and constant human rights violations, this institution was important to keep around. The work that they were doing, although riddled with flaws, was still empowering women and housing them. I left Bangladesh knowing that I had in fact made a difference because most of my students keep in touch to share how much their education and time with me changed their lives. Through this institution, they were able to see themselves beyond an extension of housewifery or marriage, as prescribed in certain parts of their culture.
It’s just, there are a lot more checks and balances necessary for progress to be made in NGOs such as this, and the leadership of these institutions needs to change for this to happen. If not, then these places transform from a safe humanitarian haven into a predatory environment for
vulnerable young women who have left their families and friends, relying on the safety of an organisation that has ownership over their entire autonomy and wellbeing.
A dangerous risk.
