to determine the education budget. “The total was set, and then to fit within that, we had to reduce our education budget,” one NGO employee said.278 International and local NGO workers have warned of the need for predictable, multi-year support for education. Most humanitarian funding, including for education, is provided in grants of one year or less.79 In other contexts, a lack of transparent, predictable funding for education has led to inefficient and inadequate education programs for refugee children.28° Humanitarian officials worried in February that the education sector’s multi-annual costs would be difficult to fund, particularly a projected $9 million per year in salaries for the instructors. “To sustain that indefinitely is a huge challenge, so we are trying to ... reduce costs,” one official said.28 A local NGO director argued, “we need long-term plans to geta good result. Big [international] organizations have the capacity, but they won’t stay here. If local organizations had the capacity — we will stay. Even if our programs are closed down, we will still be here.”282 Staff at some NGOs in the humanitarian education sector also encouraged donors to support monitoring of the quality of education. “Some donors will say, ‘Build a hundred learning centers,’ but we aren’t getting funding for quality control,” an international NGO staff member focused on education said.283 An education official at another NGO said, “if we’re doing competency assessments for students [to place them in one of the first two levels available under the informal education program], we really need to be doing them for teachers, too.”284 Donor Responses to Government Restrictions on Refugee Education Donors that are providing much-needed support to Rohingya children have privately acknowledged concerns about Bangladesh’s restrictions on their access to education, but 278 Human Rights Watch interview, international NGO staff, Cox’s Bazar, February 19, 2019. 279 OECD Refugee Funding Report, 2019. 280 Human Rights Watch, Following the Money: Lack of Transparency in Donor Funding for Syrian Refugee Education, September 14, 2017, https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/09/14/following-money/lack-transparency-donor-funding-syrian- refugee-education. 281 Human Rights Watch interview, senior humanitarian agency official, Cox’s Bazar, February 16, 2019. 282 Human Rights Watch interview, Alam Rashid, director, NONGOR, Cox’s Bazar, February 8, 2019. 283 Human Rights Watch interview, international NGO education official, Cox’s Bazar, February 15, 2019. 284 Human Rights Watch interview, international NGO education official, Cox’s Bazar, February 17, 2019. “ARE WE HUMAN?” 70