Abdur Rashid keeps returning to the same subtraction.
He teaches at a learning centre inside Kutupalong Registered Camp, the settlement where he grew up after his family fled Myanmar, and the number he cannot make work is his own paycheck.
“I am not earning any fixed amount of salary from this community-led school. My earnings depend on the payment possible to gather from different families in this camp,” Rashid says.
“If I could teach at any learning centres under a donor-funded learning program, I might earn a stipend of around Tk 13,000 for teaching as a volunteer,” he said, describing the opportunity he lost.
Many Rohingya teachers like him have had to face this reality in Cox’s Bazar since 2025.
Rashid finished his primary schooling in camp, then pushed through years of paperwork and travel restrictions to earn a bachelor’s degree from local colleges in Cox’s Bazar.
Now, he is managing a community-led school that Rohingya families increasingly treat as their only dependable option.
He is careful not to call this progress.
“When formal donor funding began to falter, educated community members stepped forward to keep our children learning,” he says.
“That stepping-in comes at a cost that families absorb directly, rather than through an aid budget.”
Families in his network pay roughly $0.50 to $6.50 a month to keep whiteboards, markers, and modest teacher stipends flowing.
It is a system built out of necessity rather than design, and Rashid is one of thousands of Rohingya educators now holding it together by hand.
A system built for emergency, not permanence
When more than 730,000 Rohingya fled Myanmar’s Rakhine State in 2017, aid agencies opened temporary learning centres within months, teaching basic literacy in Burmese, English, and math.
Initially, children were taught using an informal curriculum called the Learning Competency Framework and Approach (LCFA).
This curriculum attempted to include Burmese, English, and Mathematics; many teachers recruited from the host community were entirely unequipped to teach in Burmese.
The curriculum failed to reconcile the spoken Rohingya dialect with Burmese written script, creating severe comprehension barriers for children.
Later on, the Bangladesh government and Unicef launcheda Myanmar Curriculum by late 2021, expanding coverage toward all 410,000 school-age children in the camps through 3,200 learning centres.
A record 300,000 children enrolled in school in 2023-24, the first time Rohingya children of all ages were studied under one standardized curriculum. A dedicated campaign pulled 13,000 out-of-school children into classrooms.
However, this learning framework, temporary by design, was meant not to function as a real school network.
Host-community and Rohingya teachers taught children only five subjects through instruction in Burmese and English.
They progressed automatically through grades without formal examinations.
When the money stopped
The arithmetic Rashid does every month became the arithmetic of the entire humanitarian sector in June 2025.
The $300 million USAid fund in 2024 had fallen to $12min June 2025.
By April, the humanitarian education sector had securedonly $22m of its required $72m.
The cutbacks affected more than 6,400 learning centres across 33 camps, home to over 1.2 million people, pushingroughly 300,000 of the camps’ 437,000 school-age children out of classrooms.
Around 1,250 teachers lost their jobs overnight when Unicef and Save the Children suspended all donor-funded learning programs.
“When funds from major bilateral donors are reduced overnight, agencies face excruciating trade-offs. You cannot strip a family of their minimum 1,900-calorie daily food ration or shut down cholera treatment facilities.”
A knowledge management officer with Unicef Bangladesh in Cox’s Bazar, speaking confidentially, explained the rationale plainly.
“Education, while vital for long-term human development, is treated as a secondary priority during acute budget shortfalls.”
The community steps in
What replaced the closed centres was not a plan. It was families like the ones Rashid works with. They quietly rebuilt a parallel system out of tuition fees and volunteer labour.
These community-run schools now operate on something close to a private micro-school model, staffed by educators who completed their own upper-secondary schooling and teach one subject at a time.
The clearest sign that this parallel system now sees itself as permanent came in March 2026, when the newly formed Examination Board of Rohingya Refugees held its first matriculation exams, with question papers handed to Bangladesh’s Armed Police Battalion for secure deliveryacross camp exam centres.
Fifty three community-run schools joined the board at its founding, and the network now covers kindergarten through grade twelve with free enrolment.
It offers something the old learning centres never could: A certificate a student can actually hold onto.
A script they were never taught
Rohingya children in Myanmar were denied both Burmese literacy and any formal way to write their own language for decades.
Even a decade ago, aid workers were warning that most children were adopting Bengali instead, simply because it was more useful day-to-day than their mother tongue.
That changed in 2024, when Children on the Edge, a child rights organization, piloted mother-tongue lessons in Hanifi script across its Kutupalong and Bhasan Char classrooms, training more than 70 teachers for a program that now reaches over 6,300 children.
The Hanifi Rohingya script, developed in the 1980s and added to the Unicode standard in 2018, gave the language a modern, typeable form for the first time; it took years before any classroom actually taught it.
Even so, the shift remains marginal in light of the crisis; nearly 50 community schools teach the script at all, and most learning centres and madrasas still default to Burmese or Bengali, the languages of the systems around them rather than the language of the children inside them.
Where the mosque becomes the classroom
Many parents have expressed frustration with donor-funded learning centres, as they focus heavily on play-based learning and basic alphabet skills without offering a clear path to high school.
Parents in refugee camps prefer madrasas over donor-funded learning centres due to deep-seated cultural, structural, and operational differences. They worry that temporary frameworks will dilute traditional community values.
Religious learning in madrasas has deep roots in Rohingya communities that predate the 2017 exodus, and the camps’ network, running through neighbourhood maktabs and a formal examining body called Wifaq al-Madaris al-Arabia al-Rohingiya, has expanded quietly through years when donor-funded classrooms were closing.
Unlike the learning centres, madrasas generally do not require birth registration or other legal documentation many refugee families lack, and they are funded privately, often by donors in Saudi Arabia and Turkey rather than through the camps’ formal humanitarian architecture.
An education sector specialist who is sceptical of madrasas as a systemic fix concedes the pull is genuine.
“Madrasas are deeply embedded in the cultural landscape, but they cannot serve as a structural replacement for formal education,” the specialist said.
“They lack a standardized curriculum, formal learning outcome assessments, and recognized pathways toward higher education.”
As Cox’s Bazar nears a decade of hosting the mass influx of Rohingya refugees, the prolonged decay of primary education threatens not only the immediate welfare of children but the future stability of the entire region.
The existing learning framework currently provided to Rohingya children offers no viable long-term future.
Without funding commitment, the half-built futures of Rohingya children will remain permanently stalled in the muddy hills of Cox’s Bazar, leaving an entire generation stranded between a homeland they cannot return to and a world that has turned its back on their education.
Rashid does not need that document to know what adjustment and funding shifts look like from inside a classroom.
What thousands of teachers like him have built is not a fix for what donors walked away from. It is the measure of what remains in their hands.
Zulker Naeen is a Research Coordinator, Centre for Critical and Qualitative Studies (CQS) and Adjunct Faculty, Department of Media Studies and Journalism (MSJ), University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB). This report features interviews and infographics by Md. Mahfuzar Rahman, Shahriar Sarker, Shihab Shahriar, Sumaya Parvez, and Quazi Moyeen Ahmed for the Data Journalism Course at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh. Views expressed are the writer’s own.
