On Bangladesh’s beach, girls are surfing against the tide

By late afternoon, when the heat begins to loosen its grip on Cox’s Bazar, the beach fills with tourists. 

Vendors move between families sitting on plastic chairs. Children run toward the water and retreat from the foam. Farther out, beyond the crowded edge of the beach, a teenage girl carries a surfboard toward the Bay of Bengal.

Fatema Akter has been making this walk for years. She wades into the water, lies flat on the board and paddles toward the incoming swell. When a wave gathers behind her, she turns, pushes herself upright and rides toward shore.

At 15, Fatema is preparing for something no Bangladeshi woman has done before… compete in surfing at the Asian Games.

Bangladesh will make its surfing debut at the Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya, Japan, which begins September 19. Fatema and Mohammad Mannan, a 25-year-old male surfer from Cox’s Bazar, are expected to become the country’s first competitors in the sport. 

The surfing competition will be held at Pacific Long Beach in Tahara, one of Japan’s established surfing destinations.

For Fatema, reaching Japan would be a considerable sporting achievement. It is also the latest chapter in a much longer struggle by girls on this beach to establish that entering the sea with a surfboard is something they are entitled to do.

A hard-earned feat

For more than a decade, a small succession of girls from poor families in Cox’s Bazar have challenged expectations about how they should dress, where they should go, how long they should remain unmarried and what ambitions girls like them are permitted to have.

Some succeeded for a while and then disappeared from the sport. Some married. Some became mothers. Some were pushed back toward the lives their families had planned for them.

Fatema has, so far, kept going.

Her family originally came from Maheshkhali, an island off the Cox’s Bazar coast, before moving to the Kalatali area of the town in search of work. She is the third of four children. Her father, Zainal Abedin, died, leaving her mother, Monowara Begum, responsible for the family.

Monowara works in other people’s homes.

The economics of that arrangement leave little room for an expensive sport, particularly one with almost no professional infrastructure in Bangladesh. Yet Monowara decided that her daughter should be allowed to continue.

“Our family faces a lot of hardship,” she told Daily Waadaa. “I work in people’s homes to support my children. But Fatema has been very interested in surfing since she was little.”

The greater difficulty, she said, was not simply money.

“People have said many things, but I did not want my daughter’s dream to stop because of what others said,” Monowara said. “If she can achieve something good for the country, what greater joy could there be for me?”

That calculation — between a daughter’s ambition and the expectations surrounding her — has shaped the history of women’s surfing in Bangladesh.

Before Fatema, there was Nasima

Long before Fatema emerged, there was Nasima Akter.

Nasima grew up in extreme poverty, spent part of her childhood on the streets and eventually found her way to the surfers gathering along Cox’s Bazar beach. She became one of Bangladesh’s first female surfers and its first female lifeguard.

Surfer magazine reported last year that Nasima had been effectively abandoned as a child after resisting a life of begging. She survived around the beach selling small items and eventually began surfing. At about 14, she won a local competition against boys, earning $100.

But becoming good at surfing did not remove the pressures surrounding her.

Jaimal Yogis, an American writer who interviewed Nasima while reporting in Cox’s Bazar in 2012, later recalled that she was the only girl surfing with the group and was subjected to taunts from conservative members of the community who believed women should not swim or surf.

She was also, he said, one of the club’s best surfers.

Nasima later married and had children. According to Surfer, she left an abusive husband who had forced her to sell her surfboard. For a period, she lost her connection to the sea before eventually returning to surfing.

Her story became the subject of the documentary “Nasima,” directed by Heather Kessinger.

But Nasima was not an isolated curiosity. Behind her came a group of girls who made female surfers a recognizable, if still unusual, presence on Cox’s Bazar beach.

In 2015, National Geographic magazine documented eight girls, then between 10 and 13, who were learning to surf through the Cox’s Bazar Lifesaving and Surf Club. Most came from families dependent on what the girls themselves could earn selling jewelry, chips, eggs and other small items to tourists.

They worked long hours. Some lived in homes without running water or electricity. Surfing had to fit between earning money and family responsibilities.

Photographer Allison Joyce, who followed the girls, described how dramatically their behavior changed once they got onto surfboards or skateboards. Away from the water, they inhabited a world with narrowly defined expectations for poor adolescent girls. 

On the boards, those expectations temporarily disappeared.

The club was led by Rashed Alam, who would later become Fatema’s coach. Alam and his wife at the time, Venessa Rude, trained the girls, provided lessons and encouraged them to imagine occupations that scarcely existed for Bangladeshi women, including becoming professional surfers and lifeguards.

The significance was not difficult to see. The girls were not simply learning a sport. They were being introduced to the idea that their futures might be negotiable.

That possibility proved difficult to sustain.

A later generation was followed for three years by Bangladeshi-Canadian filmmaker Elizabeth D Costa in the documentary “Bangla Surf Girls” The film focused on Suma, Ayesha and Shobe, three teenagers for whom the surf club offered unusual independence.

Women’s Voices Now, which screened the film at its 2025 festival, described surfing as giving the girls a rare sense of agency while they struggled against the circumstances around them.

Shobe’s experience captured the conflict particularly clearly.

“Everybody says I live like a boy,” she told SBS’s Dateline in 2022. Her older sister had been married at 13. Shobe feared the same future.

“If my life is the same as my sister’s then it’s worth nothing,” she said.

Ayesha faced resistance from her father, who told Dateline that people ridiculed his family because his daughters surfed. With his daughters reaching their mid-teens, he said, he had to think about their marriages.

Ayesha preferred the beach.

“My best friend is the sea,” she said.

Staying on the board was the harder fight

The stories revealed the central problem facing Bangladesh’s female surfers. Learning to stand on a board was often the easiest part.

Remaining a surfer was harder.

Girls from wealthier families elsewhere in the world can treat adolescence as a period for developing athletic ability. Many of the girls who arrived at Cox’s Bazar surf clubs were already workers. Their income mattered to their households. 

As they entered their teenage years, pressure to marry increased. Time spent surfing could therefore be interpreted as time taken away from earning, domestic responsibilities or preparation for marriage.

Rashed Alam has watched generations confront those pressures.

He grew up around Cox’s Bazar beach and worked as a lifeguard before becoming a surfing instructor. When he began encouraging girls to surf, he encountered objections over their clothing, their presence in public and their participation in a sport alongside boys.

Many of the early pioneers eventually stopped. Fatema belongs to the generation that followed them.

She began surfing at eight and trains with the Bangladesh Surf Girls and Boys Club under Alam. She has won Bangladesh’s national surfing competition three times while continuing her studies as a 10th-grade student at Poura Preparatory High School.

Her days are organized around school and the sea.

“When I go surfing, many people in society say all sorts of things,” Fatema told Waadaa, “But I don’t listen to them because I love surfing. I want to fulfil my dream.”

The criticism is familiar to the women who came before her, but Fatema has one advantage that many of the pioneers lacked: support at home.

Her mother has watched the same social pressures that pushed other girls away from surfing and chosen not to yield to them.

That decision matters in Cox’s Bazar, where the future of a teenage athlete can depend as much on what happens inside her home as on how well she performs in the water.

For Fatema, the years of training have begun to produce results beyond the beach where she learned the sport.

From Cox’s Bazar to the Asian Games

Last year brought the first indication that the dream might extend beyond Cox’s Bazar.

Bangladesh sent five surfers, including Fatema, to the Asian Surfing Championships in Mahabalipuram, Tamil Nadu. The event brought competitors from across Asia and served as a qualification route for the 2026 Asian Games.

It was Fatema’s first international competition.

“The competition in Chennai was my first international experience,” she said. “I learned many new things about surfing there. I realised that if I want to compete at the international level, I will have to work much harder.”

Bangladesh’s performance secured the country’s first opportunity to participate in Asian Games surfing.

For a sporting culture dominated by cricket and football, the achievement attracted limited attention. For the surfing community in Cox’s Bazar, it changed what seemed possible.

Fatema is now training for competition against athletes from countries with stronger surfing traditions, better equipment, established coaching systems and access to more demanding waves.

Alam does not disguise the gap.

“Fatema is an extremely hardworking and promising surfer,” he told Waadaa. “She continues to train regularly despite adversity. Her success at the national level and experience in international competition have made her more confident.”

But talent, he said, will only take Bangladeshi surfers so far.

“Fatema is still very young and has plenty of time ahead of her,” Alam said. “With the necessary training, sponsorship and facilities, Bangladeshi surfers can achieve better results internationally. Fatema has the ability to represent Bangladesh on the biggest stages.”

Fatema’s ambitions have already moved beyond Japan.

“My biggest dream is to participate in the Olympics,” she said. “I want to compete for Bangladesh and achieve something for my country. I want to work hard and fulfill that dream one day.”

Surfing has been an Olympic sport since the Tokyo Games. Reaching that level would require years of international competition and resources that remain scarce in Bangladesh.

But Fatema has something Nasima and the first girls on Cox’s Bazar beach did not have…predecessors.

The importance of that history is visible in small ways. A girl carrying a surfboard along the beach is no longer unprecedented. Female surfers from Cox’s Bazar have appeared in documentaries, international magazines and television reports. Girls have won competitions. Parents have watched them do it.

The resistance has not disappeared. Neither have poverty, pressure to marry or the question that has followed successive generations of surfer girls: whether they will still be allowed to surf when childhood ends.

The stories of Nasima, Suma, Ayesha and Shobe show how difficult that transition can be. The surfboard could give a girl freedom for several hours, but it could not necessarily determine what happened when she returned home.

Fatema’s mother has answered that question differently.

She has continued cleaning other people’s homes while her daughter trains. She has heard the criticism and decided that the possibility of her daughter succeeding matters more.

And every morning, Fatema returns to the beach. “I have a dream to carry,” she told Waadaa while heading towards the wave.

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