From Survival to Solutions: Refugees Leading by Design
Published on
Jun 24, 2025
This summer marks the launch of something we’ve been dreaming about for a long time: Every Shelter’s first-ever Design School, an intensive, hands-on course that puts creativity, ownership, and problem-solving directly into the hands of refugees.
In Nakivale Refugee Settlement in Uganda—one of the oldest and largest in Africa—refugees are doing far more than surviving. They’re adapting. Innovating. Designing. And they’re doing it with limited resources and unlimited ingenuity.
It’s this everyday creativity that inspired us to start the Design School in the first place.
Refugees as Designers of Their Own Future
The resourcefulness of refugees is often overlooked. But if you spend even one day in Nakivale, you’ll see it everywhere: tarps turned into rainwater systems, scrap wood reimagined into shelving, communal kitchens shaped out of salvaged materials.
At Every Shelter, we believe refugees are the experts of their own lived experience. They understand their needs, challenges, and hopes better than anyone else—and they deserve the tools and training to design solutions that truly reflect that.
This Design School is a bold step in that direction.
Our nine-week intensive course is designed for young refugees aged 18–30, focusing on addressing real shelter challenges within the Nakivale community.
The program emphasizes:
Creative problem-solving
Hands-on learning
Collaboration and leadership
Use of local, readily available materials
Building small-scale prototypes
Repurposing everyday objects into shelter solutions
We’ve designed this course to be fast-paced, practical, and rooted in local context—with every session focused on the realities that our students and their communities face each day.
Our long-term goal is to empower students not only to solve problems for themselves and their neighbors, but to create shelter solutions that are scalable—ideas that can take root across Nakivale and beyond.
Because when young people lead, communities shift. When refugees design, shelter changes.
support Shelter Depot
Every Donation will impact our ability to fund the shelter depot efforts as well as train refugees to build and maintain their homes.
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As the first cohort gets underway, we’re excited to see what this group creates. But more than that, we’re excited to learn from them—to watch how their insights, their innovations, and their stories shape the future of shelter.
We’ll be sharing updates from the field as the program progresses, and we hope you’ll follow along.
After all, real change starts when those most affected by the problem are trusted to lead the solution.
Want to support the Design School and help grow this work? Your support helps scale community-led solutions like this one.
Let’s keep building—one cohort, one innovation at a time.
