DHAKA: Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh are at heightened risk of losing access to essential services, the UN refugee agency has warned as it struggles to secure adequate funding.
Bangladesh hosts more than 1.3 million Rohingya on its southeast coast, who are cramped inside 33 camps in Cox’s Bazar — the world’s largest refugee settlement.
Nearly 150,000 of them have fled Myanmar’s Rakhine State over the past 18 months in what has become the largest influx since 2017, when some 750,000 Rohingya crossed to neighboring Bangladesh to escape a deadly crackdown by Myanmar’s military, which the UN has been referring to as a textbook case of ethnic cleansing.
“With the acute global funding crisis, the critical needs of both newly arrived refugees and those already present will be unmet, and essential services for the whole Rohingya refugee population are at risk of collapsing,” the UNHCR said in a statement issued on Friday.
Only 35 percent of UNHCR’s $255 million appeal for the Rohingya has been funded.
Unless the agency secures additional funds, health services for the Rohingya population in Bangladesh will be “severely disrupted by September and essential cooking fuel, or LPG, will run out. By December, food assistance will stop.”
Severe aid cuts from major donors, such as the US under President Donald Trump and other Western countries, have had a major impact on the humanitarian sector.
The education of Rohingya children has already been impacted, as the UN’s children agency UNICEF was forced to suspend thousands of learning centers in Cox’s Bazar last month, worsening an education crisis for about 437,000 school-age children in the camps.
“The funding crisis for the Rohingyas is in a very dire state now. The health sector is next, as it is hit hard by the fund crunch. Many of the health centers have suspended their services that severely impacted thousands of pregnant women, lactating mothers, newborn babies and children,” Mizanur Rahman, refugee relief and repatriation commissioner in Cox’s Bazar, told Arab News on Saturday.
Bangladesh has not been able to arrange new shelters for the newly arrived Rohingya, with most of them now living with relatives who arrived earlier, he added.
“Site management, which covers the water and sanitation issues, is also reeling. Shelter management is facing a bad situation,” Rahman said.
“The ongoing crisis may force the Rohingyas to complete desperation.”
