Current Plans for Rohingya Children Fail to Fulfill Their Right to Education The Bangladesh government extended its bans on formal education, Bengali language instruction, and secondary education to Rohingya children who fled after August 2017. To make matters worse, in the fall of 2017 Bangladesh’s National Task Force barred the education sector from teaching newly-arrived refugee children with the non-formal version of the curriculum that was allowed in the older, UNHCR-run camps for registered refugees. As to the Myanmar curriculum, Myanmar authorities have not approved its use for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, which means that these children cannot take national examinations or receive any certification for their schooling. The humanitarian education sector “couldn’t use the Myanmar or Bangladesh curricula, so the kids were caught in the middle,” a humanitarian agency official said. Instead, UNICEF undertook the time-consuming and costly process of creating a curriculum from scratch for Rohingya refugee children, eventually contracting the British Council to provide the English lessons and BRAC (Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee), an international humanitarian NGO headquartered in Bangladesh, to provide Burmese language and mathematics lessons. “We had to develop an entire curriculum for every day of every class, then translate it, then print it,” the international NGO official said. Wary of crossing government red lines, the humanitarian education sector does not describe the informal curriculum as a “curriculum.” It was first designated the Learning Competency Framework and Approach (LCFA); the government later responded to the LCFA with a policy it called Guidelines for Informal Education Programming (GIEP). Humanitarian groups operate in a fog of euphemism: the LCFA/GIEP (hereinafter referred to as an “informal education program”) is taught in “learning centers” rather than schools, by “facilitators,” not teachers. UNICEF submitted the first two levels of the informal program — the first is roughly equivalent to a year of pre-primary and a year of primary education, the second to grades 2 and 3, which include lesson plans for teachers and Burmese language books for students — to the government for approval in March 2018, and the second two levels in July 2018. Humanitarian groups providing education in the camps began cautiously rolling out the first level in January 2019, and the government finally approved the first two levels in May. “The education ministry has been good, the holdup is political,” a senior humanitarian official said. “ARE WE HUMAN?” 8