Rohingya ‘lost generation’ struggle to study in Bangladesh camps

COX’S BAZAR: Sixteen-year-old Kefayat Ullah walked to his school in southern Bangladesh in late January, as he had done most days for the previous six years, to find that – despite being one of the top students in his class – he had been expelled.
A government investigation had outed him, along with dozens of his classmates, as a Rohingya refugee, a member of the mostly stateless Muslim minority from neighbouring Myanmar.
“Our headmaster called us into his office and told us that there’s an order that Rohingya students have no rights to study here anymore,” said the teenager, a small boy with cropped hair and a faint moustache. “We went back home crying.”
For years, Bangladeshi schools have quietly admitted some of the Rohingya who live as refugees in sprawling camps on the country’s southern coast, and whose numbers have swelled to more than 1 million since violence across the border in 2017. But the new influx has tested the hospitality of the Bangladeshi government, leading them to apply tighter controls on the population.
The recent expulsions highlight the struggle of hundreds of thousands of children desperate to study in the world’s largest refugee settlement, but at risk of missing out on crucial years of education and the chance to obtain formal qualifications.
Bangladesh’s Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, meanwhile, has said the country cannot afford to integrate them.
Hungry for education
In some countries, governments allow refugees to study in local schools, allowing them to gain recognised qualifications, or permit institutions in the camps to teach the national curriculum. But Bangladesh has not recognised the vast majority of the Rohingya as refugees and does not issue birth certificates for those born in the camps, making their legal status unclear.
The government has also forbidden centres in the camps from teaching the Bangladesh curriculum, according to the U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF.
But many children and their parents say the hundreds of learning centres operated in the camps by international NGOs and the U.N. offer mostly unstructured learning and playtime.
Bob Rae, Canada’s Special Envoy to Myanmar, who has also travelled to Bangladesh, said Bangladesh authorities including Sheikh Hasina “have emphasized that the refugee camp is supposed to be ‘short term’ and that to talk about schooling beyond learning centres for very young children would risk giving the impression, to Myanmar and the world, that camps were there to stay”.
In the camps, many children study by themselves from tattered textbooks carried from Myanmar or purchased at local markets, where stalls ply a swift trade in copies of the Myanmar curriculum smuggled across the border. A makeshift school staffed with Rohingya volunteer teachers opened in February, though the headteacher said they had no official permission to operate.
Karen Reidy, a communications officer at UNICEF, which leads education programming in the camps, said efforts were under way to adapt other countries’ curriculums into a “learning framework”. (Reuters)