In surveys and interviews, Rohingya refugees consistently identify the denial of education
in the camps as one of their top concerns. “We have a saying: if you want to destroy a
community you don’t have to kill the people, just prevent them from studying,” Mohamed
A., a Rohingya teacher living in the refugee camps told Human Rights Watch. “[T]here are
two or three lakh [200-300,000] students who did not even finish class three, and their
future will be destroyed, because there is no proper education in the camp.”
Education could position Rohingya children to become self-sufficient adults who
contribute to economic growth, whether in Bangladesh or Myanmar. As the government of
Bangladesh affirmed in a 2018 funding proposal, “educating refugees and displaced
persons has the multiplier effect of empowering them, reduces their dependence on the
host government, and contributing to long term peace and social cohesion.” A World Bank
review of 50 years of data found that each additional year of a child’s education leads toa
9 percent increase in earnings as an adult.: A dollar invested in an additional year of
schooling, particularly for girls, generates earnings and health benefits of US $4 in lowermiddle income countries, lowers rates of child marriage, and increases gender equality.2
By contrast, Bangladesh as well as the international community will bear the costs of
denying education to a new generation of Rohingya children, which could feed the despair
for a better future that criminal trafficking networks prey on and lock the Rohingya
population into a cycle of poverty, exploitation, and dependency on fickle humanitarian
donations. In 2015, tens of thousands of Rohingya risked their lives to escape Myanmar as
well as Bangladesh on perilous boat journeys, and some cited the deprivation of education
among their reasons for fleeing. For the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya children stuck
in the refugee camps, the ban on formal education perpetuates the rupture with their past
and is a barrier to a better future.
Denial of Education Justified by Threatened Repatriation to Myanmar
Bangladesh’s policy that Rohingya children who arrived after August 2017 may receive only
informal education and no instruction in Bangla was set by the government’s National Task
11n South Asia, the data shows an 8.1 percent increase per year of education. George Psacharopoulos, Harry Antony Patrinos,
“Returns to Investment in Education: A Decennial Review of the Global Literature,” World Bank Group, April 2018,
p. 10. http://datatopics.worldbank.org/education/files/GlobalAchievement/ReturnWPS8402.pdf (accessed July 23, 2019).
2 International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity, The Learning Generation, May 2018, p. 14,
https://report.educationcommission.org/download/891/ (accessed June 1, 2019).
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HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH | DECEMBER 2019