Across the Middle East, 4.7 million women experience hearing or speech impairment. Yet during Pink October, a month dedicated to breast cancer awareness, there are no campaigns designed for this community. Emirates NBD, the largest banking institution in the UAE, is committed to building an inclusive society through its ‘TogetherLimitless’ program. But across 300 universally used sign languages, signs for ‘cancerous’ and ‘lumps’ don’t exist – leading to millions of women missing out on life-saving messages. So, during this month, Emirates NBD needed to design new life-saving signs to educate this community on the importance of a self-check.

Despite most organizations launching numerous campaigns highlighting the importance of breast cancer awareness during Pink October, the topic remains a largely taboo subject across the Middle East. As a result of this, many women fail to be open about their symptoms or get routine check-ups, thereby delaying life-saving early diagnosis and treatments.

In this context, it is crucial for breast cancer awareness campaigns to reach more women and help disrupt this social stigma. But for 4.7 million women across the region who are hearing and speech impaired, these messages rarely ever directly target them. Especially when signs for ‘cancerous’ and ‘lumps’ do not exist across 300 universally used sign languages. Making it even harder to raise breast cancer awareness amongst this community.

As the region's largest bank and one that believes in building an inclusive society through its ‘TogetherLimitless’ program, Emirates NBD needed a campaign that directly spoke to these women. And that meant designing new life-saving signs that otherwise didn’t exist in sign language.

Situation: Pink October is usually marked by a flood of breast cancer awareness campaigns. However, most of these are not designed with hearing and speech impaired women in mind.

Brief: Emirates NBD, being the region's largest banking institution, has always used its CSR initiatives to empower the community at a macro and micro level. So, when breast cancer awareness month was around the corner, the bank was clear in its stand of creating a campaign that spoke to everyone.

Objectives: The ‘TogetherLimitless’ program was at the forefront of the bank’s commitment to creating an inclusive campaign that broke the barriers of disability. We decided to make this the most exclusive campaign ever, creating new life-saving signs in a language specifically used by 4.7 million women.

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Working with Arabic sign language experts and design experts, we created the first breast cancer self-check in sign language. We developed two unique signs for ‘cancerous’ and ‘lumps’, which otherwise didn’t exist in sign language. These signs were used to create a new design language of inclusivity. Transformed into bold, illustrated iconography, they were shared across social media and special-needs schools to educate and empower hearing and speech impaired communities. Easily adaptable across multiple mediums and clearly understood, they taught everyone how to speak the language of an otherwise marginalized section of society and how to self-check for early diagnosis.