There is a child in Cox’s Bazar who has never known any home but a camp. She was born somewhere between bamboo and tarpaulin to parents who crossed jungles and rivers in the dark of August 2017.
She is nine years old now. She has never seen Rakhine State. She does not know what citizenship feels like. And, by any official count, she remains a “temporary” presence in Bangladesh.
This August marks nine years since the most violent chapter of the Rohingya exodus. More than 723,000 people crossed into Bangladesh after August 25, 2017, fleeing what the United Nations described as textbook ethnic cleansing.
According to UNHCR Bangladesh, the country now hosts more than 1.2 million Rohingya, over 90% of the world’s displaced Rohingya population, in 33 camps in Cox’s Bazar and on Bhashan Char. More than half are under 18.
Bangladesh opened its borders and thereby absorbed enormous pressure on Cox’s Bazar’s land, forests, water, and livelihoods. Host communities watched resources increasingly favour the refugee response.
Bangladesh has consistently called for safe, dignified and voluntary repatriation; although Myanmar agreed in principle in early 2025 to accept 180,000 Rohingya initially, with another 70,000 under verification, the process has stalled amid the Arakan Army’s control of much of Rakhine State and Myanmar’s political turmoil.
The roadmap exists on paper. The road does not.
Bangladesh cannot integrate the Rohingya without risking permanence and weakening pressure for repatriation, cannot force them back into a country at war, and cannot sustain more than a million people indefinitely as international aid declines.
Compounding this is a structural vacuum: Bangladesh has no national refugee policy or domestic legal framework governing the status and rights of those it shelters.
A million people are being managed through humanitarian directives and improvised arrangements for what has become a decade-long presence. Meanwhile, the boundaries between “guest” and “neighbour” have inevitably begun to blur.
The most immediate threat is now the erosion of the humanitarian response itself.
In March 2025, the government of Bangladesh and the United Nations launched the 2025–26 Joint Response Plan, seeking $934.5 million to support 1.48 million people. By mid-year, it was only 21.7% funded. Food rations were reduced again, while schools and primary healthcare services faced closure.
More than 95% of Rohingya in Bangladesh depend entirely on humanitarian assistance for food, healthcare, and education. According to Unicef, a 27% budget loss led to the closure of approximately 2,800 schools in June 2025.
An International Rescue Committee survey found that 69% of refugee households reported children dropping out of school, while half said their children had been forced into labour. Only 2% of parents said they felt hopeful about their children’s futures.
These are not abstract statistics. They describe daily life for more than a million people living in fragile shelters on landslide-prone hills, waiting for aid in a country that is not theirs and a crisis that is no longer headline news.
The Rohingya funding crisis is part of a wider global humanitarian recession. International humanitarian assistance fell by nearly $5 billion in 2024, the largest single-year decline recorded. In 2025, funding for the UN’s global appeal was at its lowest in a decade, while humanitarians reached 25 million fewer people than the previous year.
Meanwhile, major crises, from Gaza and Sudan to Ukraine, Syria, Haiti, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Sahel, compete for political attention and scarce resources.
The Rohingya, stateless for decades before the 2017 violence, occupy an especially difficult position: Their crisis is neither urgent enough for the front page nor resolved enough to be forgotten.
There is another uncomfortable contradiction. For years, the humanitarian sector has championed localization, the principle that local and national organizations should lead responses in their own countries rather than serve as subcontractors to international organisations.
The Grand Bargain, agreed by major donors and aid organisations in 2016, committed to directing 25% of humanitarian funding to local actors by 2020. That target was missed; direct funding to local organisations has remained below 3% for years. As donor budgets shrink, this gap risks becoming structural.
Bangladesh has organizations with deep roots in the communities they serve, alongside the language, relationships, and contextual knowledge needed for effective humanitarian work. They do not need layers of intermediaries. They need resources, trust, and sustained investment in institutional capacity.
The ninth year therefore demands more than commemoration. It demands four honest conversations.
First, repatriation needs a diplomatic strategy.
With Rakhine State at war and much of it controlled by the Arakan Army, Bangladesh cannot negotiate alone. ASEAN, China, and the UN Security Council must find ways to engage relevant actors on conditions for return, or accept that repatriation is unlikely soon and plan accordingly. The Rohingya’s right to return means little without citizenship, safety, and a Myanmar willing to accept them.
Second, dignity cannot wait for return.
If repatriation is not imminent, the Rohingya need more than survival: livelihoods, accredited education, psychosocial support, protection from violence and trafficking, and greater space to develop their own leadership and civic institutions.
Third, funding must match the localization promise.
National organizations need direct, sustained funding, not layers of international intermediaries or short grant cycles, to build capacity and deliver effective, context-driven responses.
Fourth, host communities must be part of the solution.
Bangladesh’s generosity has placed significant pressure on Cox’s Bazar. A sustainable response must invest in local infrastructure, services, and livelihoods alongside those of the Rohingya. The two communities share one ecosystem; treating them accordingly is not charity, but logic.
Nine years after a night of fire and flight that much of the world has largely forgotten, more than a million people remain in limbo, waiting for schools to reopen, for rations to arrive in full, for safety, and for the chance to return with dignity.
For a generation of nine-year-olds, teenagers, and young adults who have known nothing but the camps, that wait is for something they cannot yet name: The first real day of a life that belongs to them.
Md Quamruzzaman is Head of Pooled Fund for Localization, Advocacy for Social Change, Brac and Fahmid Ahmed Khan is Localization Communication Expert, Brac.