Following brutal violence against Myanmar’s Rohingya population, almost a million members of the persecuted minority group now live in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. The most recent wave of Rohingyas arrived in August 2017, after Myanmar’s military launched a deadly counter-insurgency and ethnic cleansing campaign against the Rohingyas.
The migration of Rohingyas to Bangladesh has brought with it some economic challenges. According to the Tricontinental Centre (CETRI), a Belgian NGO, supporting Rohingya refugees costs Bangladesh an estimated $1.21 billion a year. In recent years, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as several other crises around the world, international humanitarian aid for Rohingyas has been shrinking. Anas Ansar, a Bangladeshi PhD researcher at Germany’s Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, told Peace News Network that humanitarian aid and security are both pressing concerns at the moment.
“The grave concerns at this moment are the reduction in humanitarian relief operations, reductions in global funding, and disappearing interest by the international community regarding the Rohingya plight,” Ansar said.
When the Rohingya refugees began to arrive in 2017, they were welcomed by many in Bangladesh. Since then, the “sentiment has shifted,” and they face an environment that has become less welcoming in recent years. But some women’s initiatives in Cox’s Bazar are working to build peace, livelihoods, and gender equality. One girls school, Maiya School, is working with local organizations to empower Bangladeshi women to build their own livelihoods, in order to cope with price hikes. The school is also working towards gender equality by teaching girls advocacy skills, and hiring both Bangladeshi and Rohingya staff.
The Australian-run school educates 80 Rohingya girls. It opened in April 2022 in the Katupalong refugee camp, and aims to help displaced girls obtain an education in order to uplift their communities. Maiya seeks to fill a gap in girl’s education in the refugee camps, particularly as girls in these camps are often vulnerable to child marriage and gender-based violence (GBV). The school has a security fence around it so that students won’t be harassed by men and boys, and all of the school’s teachers are women. The school provides Rohingya girls with a safe environment to learn, and clean facilities, while focusing on female empowerment.
But the school isn’t only helping Rohingyas. In order to help women in the host community cope with rising costs, Maiya is working on a livelihoods project. In May 2023, the school began partnering with two Bangladeshi women’s organizations, Hilfull and Mamota, as part of the Women’s Livelihood Project. The project teaches 40 Bangladeshi women in the Ukhiya sub-district homestead gardening, compost training, pickling, and sewing. These skills help the women earn more income as prices in the area rise. This has helped to build better relations between Bangladeshis and Rohingyas.
Women make pickled products with the Livelihoods Project, photo by Maiya School.
“In the past, onions were about 25 to 30 taka [per kilogram], now it’s about 250 taka. Vegetables were about 25 taka [per kilogram], now they are about 80 taka,” Khaleda Begum, a member of Hilfull, told Peace News Network.
Begum said that Rohingyas receive more aid than Bangladeshi host communities. She noted that Rohingyas might receive helpful tools such as sewing machines, but Bangladeshis don’t. When asked if this had caused anger among Bangladeshis, Begum said that it had.
“Other organizations are working with the Rohingya community, if they also work with host communities, it will be perfect,” she said.
Women involved in the project sell their products, such as embroidered handicrafts and pickled goods. The women sometimes struggle to find enough outlets to sell their goods, Begum added. She said that she was able to sell some products at a fair an hour away in a larger city, but these kinds of fairs don’t happen often. Still, Begum said the Livelihoods Project has helped Bangladeshis to become less angry at Rohingyas, since Bangladeshis are getting some support.
A woman involved in the Livelihoods Project embroiders, photo by Maiya School.
Maiya School also builds relations between the refugees and host community by hiring both Bangladeshi and Rohingya staff, who work side-by-side. Half of the staff working within the camp are Bangladeshi, and half are Rohingyas, said Philippa Nilsson, the school’s co-founder and director. Nilsson said the school has a Rohingya teacher who teaches Burmese language, and a teacher from the Bangladeshi host community who teaches English. She said the management team above them is a “mixed team.”
“They work really well together, and have different skills and different knowledge and context as well,” she told Peace News Network.
In addition to bringing the communities together to collaborate in their work, Nilsson said that the Rohingya Education Project and the Livelihoods project are helping to build peace by providing resources and training to both communities. She said that the Bangladeshi workers know the Rohingya community very well, and work well with them.
“I believe that that is working towards peace and reconciliation overall by equipping our girls with advocacy skills, and really empowering them with an education so that in the future they can advocate for themselves to their community, to the global community, and they can actually advocate for their human rights.”
Nilsson added that the school provides girls with life skills training about how people interact in society, and how to be active in society. The school also has a youth advisory panel consisting of 10 girls who meet every couple of months to discuss issues that impact them.
“Even by just providing a space where girls can safely meet and talk about issues that are important to them and try and come up with solutions, that is really unique and important for them to feel empowered and be able to advocate for themselves in the future,” Nilsson said.
The school follows Myanmar’s curriculum, so that the girls will be prepared with the same education as other Burmese citizens if they return to Myanmar.
Tara Abhasakun
Tara Abhasakun is a journalist in Bangkok. She has reported on a range of human rights issues involving youth protests in Thailand, as well as arts and culture. Tara's work has appeared in several outlets, including Al Jazeera and South China Morning Post.
