On the surface, life in the world’s largest refugee camp complex appears to be ticking along as usual. But looming on the horizon are funding cuts that will soon dramatically change conditions for the more than one million people who live in camps near Cox’s Bazar in southern Bangladesh.
Provision of soap could cease within weeks. Cooking fuel soon after. Education is to be cut back to prioritise limited resources for water and food. Eight years into the displacement, running the camps as in previous years appears untenable. Muhammad Yunus, Bangladesh’s interim leader, has called for an international conference in September to help unpack options for what happens next.
Despite their horrific origins, setting up the camps in Cox’s Bazar was a success for humanitarian action. I first visited in 2017 when the allocated land was a chaos of tarpaulin sheets and traumatised new arrivals. Thanks to the combined efforts of the government of Bangladesh, international donors, local actors and international humanitarian organisations – shelter, water, and food were available to hundreds of thousands of people within weeks. Almost a decade later, the place is unrecognisable. There are roads, lighting, clinics, water points, schools, day centres, and kiosk shops. The camps represent a remarkable, sustained effort to protect victims of persecution and violence.
Yet success is part of the problem. Support has been unsustainably generous. Multiple and duplicative expatriate-led teams live in the nearby town and visit constantly. Fleets of branded vehicles plough endlessly through the narrow streets. The facilities in the camps are very basic – but access to clean water is far better in the camps of Cox’s Bazar than in the poorer areas of most Bangladeshi cities, as is access to doctors, nurses, medicines, teachers, and carers. The displaced Rohingya represent around 0.7% of the population of Bangladesh, but a vastly disproportionate percentage of humanitarian financing and international attention are concentrated on their plight: something that inevitably irritates Bangladeshi political leaders and host communities.
And success in setting up camp services masks a darker, more complex reality for the Rohingya. Eight years of displacement and camp life have taken their toll. Boredom, depression, and domestic violence are endemic. Gangs rule the camps at night. Trafficking, kidnapping, recruitment to fight in Myanmar, and desperate escape attempts, often ending in tragedy on the Andaman Sea, are all on the rise. These trends will only be exacerbated by the coming funding cuts to basic services, underlining the urgency to find new options.
But options are limited. The previous government in Bangladesh stuck rigidly to the line that everyone in the camps must go back to Myanmar. The only compromises in the meantime were to allow limited humanitarian services until people could go home, and to decongest the camps in Cox’s Bazar by moving some people to the remote island of Bhasan Char. It is time to rethink that strategy. Repatriation remains elusive while fighting plagues Rakhine State, where most of the Rohingya used to call home. Bhasan Char is also proving too expensive to sustain. And soon there won’t be enough money to fund essential services in the camps themselves.
So, what are the options that can be discussed in September?
The first point will need to remain an emphasis on safe and voluntary repatriation, which is deeply challenging given the situation in Myanmar. This has always been the government of Bangladesh’s demand and the expressed wish of most of the people living in the camps. It should remain the primary objective of planning and diplomacy. Everything else is a strategy for ‘in the meantime’.
In the meantime, there needs to be a fresh, objective look into the cost of running the camps. The UN’s Joint Response Plan has been around $800 million per year, not including costs for the growing number of new arrivals. This price tag reflects the sustained ambitions of multiple international agencies that rushed in to provide lifesaving support in 2017 when money was no obstacle. Most do fantastic work, but where it is now possible to cut out the middleman and invest directly into the national and local actors delivering the services, that option should be taken. International agencies may not volunteer to step aside, so donors will have to insist on it. IFRC, BRAC and Bangladesh Red Crescent are discussing a side event at the conference in September to explore this.
Thirdly, the bubble of camp life needs to be broken. Not only are services inside the camp often better than in neighbouring, host communities, but an artificial aid dependency has been established in which every resident is targeted for aid regardless of relative vulnerability. This needs to be tackled in three ways.
Firstly, by switching as many services as possible to mobile cash so camp residents can buy and trade amongst themselves and with the host community. Secondly, by scaling up support for in-camp livelihood initiatives that enable some people to move off beneficiary lists and thereby allow the diminished amounts of aid to focus on the most vulnerable.
A critical third move would be to visibly ramp up development bank financing for the host community. The more the host community feels benefits and attention from being hosts, the less likely they will resent the inevitable strategy adjustments the government of Bangladesh must quietly make to manage protracted displacement within their borders. Investing in health, education, and job generation capacity outside the camps will benefit neighbours in the camps too.
None of these approaches will satisfy those looking for big headline solutions – such as that everyone should go back immediately, or everyone should be allowed to integrate in Bangladesh. As neither of those options are feasible, the conference will have no choice but to keep one eye on the goal of eventual repatriation, and the other on pragmatic solutions for ‘in the meantime.’
