Staff Reporter :
Rohingya refugee children in Bangladesh have been facing extreme education crisis as the United States (US) and other foreign donor have cut-offs the humanitarian aid.
The cutbacks in humanitarian aid have worsened the existing education crisis for 437,000 school-age children in Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh, with schools that served hundreds of thousands of children shut down, reports Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Wednesday.
On June 3, 2025, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) suspended thousands of “learning centers” run by nongovernmental organizations in the refugee camps, due to lack of funding.
The only education currently in the Bangladesh refugee camps is at schools established by the Rohingya community without outside support or official recognition. Bangladesh’s interim government should urgently lift restrictions on education for Rohingya refugees, such as lack of accreditation, and donors should support community-led schools. The government should also permit Rohingya children to enroll in schools outside the camps.
“The US and other donor governments are abandoning education for Rohingya children after the previous Bangladesh government long blocked it,” said Bill Van Esveld, associate children’s rights director at Human Rights Watch. “The interim Bangladesh government should uphold everyone’s right to education, while donors should support the Rohingya community’s efforts to prevent a lost generation of students.”
In April and May, Human Rights Watch spoke with 39 Rohingya refugee students, parents, and teachers in the camps in the Cox’s Bazar District, 22 on Bhasan Char island also housing refugees, and 14 international and Bangladeshi teachers, humanitarian workers, and education experts. Most Rohingya fled persecution and wartime atrocities in Myanmar, where they are effectively denied citizenship and other rights.
In 2024, the US government provided US$300 million to respond to the Rohingya refugee crisis, over half of the total amount received by humanitarian agencies. But as of June 2025, the administration of President Donald Trump had slashed aid to $12 million.
By April, the humanitarian education sector in Bangladesh – which funds the learning centers – had secured only about $22 million of its $72 million annual budget and was significantly reducing expenditures. Out of a target of 437,000 school-age children in the camps, about 304,000 were enrolled in the learning centers, now closed.
UNICEF aimed to reopen the learning centers it funded for classes 6 and above by June 29, and encouraged nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to reopen lower classes if they could find other sources of funding.
Rohingya refugees said that community-led schools offered higher-quality education than the learning centers. They hired teachers who had completed most of their upper secondary schooling, and classes had multiple teachers who specialized in different subjects, reports BSS.
