refugee children and all 46 Rohingya refugee teachers whom Human Rights Watch interviewed in Cox’s Bazar in February 2019, who arrived in Bangladesh since August 2017, said they wanted the option of continuing to use the Myanmar curriculum. Students who had gone to school for a year or two in Myanmar described the “learning centers” as an educational step backwards, and more advanced students feared that their years of studying would be lost. Parents and teachers feared that the Myanmar authorities might twist refugees’ illiteracy in Burmese into “evidence” that Rohingya have no real links to Myanmar. “When the Myanmar government allows us back they will say, ‘Do you know Burmese? No, you’re illiterate? Look at that, you’re Bangladeshi’,” said Mohamed S., a refugee who is using the Myanmar curriculum to teach students out of his own shelter in the Cox’s Bazar camp. Given popular demand and the lack of any quality alternatives, some former teachers have set up unofficial schools in the Cox’s Bazar camps using the Myanmar curriculum, while others set up “private schools” in their own shelters. They charge a minimal fee to cover the cost of photocopying battered Myanmar textbooks. None of the unofficial teachers we spoke to had been supported or even consulted by the humanitarian groups working in the education sector. The operation of their schools relies on the acquiescence of the “Campin-Charge” or CIC, the Bangladeshi officials responsible for a given section of the megacamp. At least two such unofficial schools were closed in 2018 because they were teaching classes 7 through 9, which the CICs deemed to be too advanced, former teachers at the schools said. In addition to a lack of secondary-level education under the informal education program, technical and vocational training for refugee adolescents and youth who are out of school is “politically sensitive,” a humanitarian official said. The humanitarian groups working in the education sector aimed to support trainings for refugees in skills needed inside the camps, such as mobile phone repair. “But livelihoods is a ‘no’,” an NGO official said of government attitudes toward support for income-generating activity for refugees, and “lack of livelihoods is directly contributing to child marriage and child labor.” Checkpoints block refugees from moving far outside the camps to look for work. Girls are especially at risk of being denied education due to a combination of policy barriers and cultural obstacles. Rohingya parents often prohibit their daughters from attending school once the girls begin menstruating, according to Rohingya camp residents, “ARE WE HUMAN?” 10