A generation sees future murky

Can you imagine a home that feels like a jail? For more than a million Rohingya in the camps of Cox’s Bazar, barbed wire isn’t just a boundary — it’s a barrier to the future. For children here, eight years have passed off in Bangladesh without a stable, qualified school system. And this nemesis follows decades of being excluded back in Myanmar—their homeland. The result isn’t just lost lessons, but the slow extinction of hope.

We recently walked through these camps, sat on the floors of bamboo classrooms, and listened to students, parents, and teachers. Their message was unanimous and urgent: without education, a generation is being lost before our eyes.

A collapsing lifeline it veritably looks like: The education effort, coordinated by the Government of Bangladesh with UNICEF, UNHCR, and partner NGOs, is crumbling. It’s being starved of funds. The consequences are visible in every lane. Recent assessments indicate that a staggering 83 per cent of school-aged children are now out of school. Thousands of learning centres have shut down or sharply reduced class hours, affecting hundreds of thousands of children.

“I used to go to school every day, but now I only go twice a week because the learning centre opens less,” says Yunus, 14, in Camp-3. Another teen, Ibrahim, 15, is even less fortunate. “When the school is closed, I feel empty. As some schools open, my class is still closed. I start forgetting what I learned,” says he.

For families who fled genocide, the collapse of schooling feels like another betrayal. “We lost our homes, our land, our rights in Myanmar,” moans Mohammed Jaker, a father of three, in Kutupalong. “Now, our children are losing their future here.”

Even when centres are “open,” conditions are brutal. These aren’t schools the way most of us imagine them. They’re fragile shelters of bamboo and tarpaulin, buckling beneath monsoon rains and sweltering heat.

“When it rains, our school floods,” says Mariam, 11, from Camp-1E. “Sometimes I still go, even if it means sitting in mud, because I love to draw.”

In one centre we visited, rain poured through a leaking roof while children stood huddled in the only dry corner, guarding a few precious notebooks. When the rain stopped, they wiped the floor with rags and began over again. “Our school is a small bamboo house with holes in the roof,” says Sajeda, a teacher in Camp-3. “When it rains, I cover the books with plastic. But I never cancel class; the children come even in the rain.”

When the monsoon passes, the sun becomes the enemy. Plastic roofs trap heat; children faint in rooms designed for 25 but crammed with 40–70 students. Materials are always running out. We saw children — many barefoot — carrying faded, re-used notebooks. “Sometimes I can’t go because we don’t have enough notebooks or pencils,” says Hasina, aged 12. “My centre can hold 25 students,” adds teacher Md Towki. “Now we have over 40. We can’t control them, and quality suffers.”

The cost of these interruptions isn’t just lost hours. It’s the erosion of habit and confidence. After weather closures or long funding gaps, children drift away — and bringing them back gets harder each time.

Two school systems — neither built to last: Education in the camps runs on two fragile tracks.

• NGO-supported learning centres operate with donor funding through organisations such as UNICEF, BRAC, UNHCR and local partners. Some follow the Myanmar Curriculum (MC), others use NGO-developed frameworks focused on foundational literacy, numeracy9, and life skills. Teacher training exists, but it’s short. Materials are scarce. Hours have been cut.

• Community-based schools are created and led by Rohingya teachers — some former educators from Myanmar, others young people who studied relentlessly in the camps. To juggle other work, they often run early-morning and evening shifts (frequently 6–8 a.m. and 6–8 p.m.). Parents who can afford contribute small amounts for materials and modest tuition—many cannot. Teachers receive little or no fixed salary, and training is ad hoc.

The gradual rollout of the Myanmar Curriculum was real progress. But, in practice, access remains uneven and fragile. Classes commonly reach up to Grade 10, and a basic Grade 12 track is being piloted, but there’s still no robust, recognised path to higher-secondary completion across the board — let alone to college or university. Laboratory-based science is often theoretical: physics and chemistry without experiments, “computer skills” without computers.

The ceiling arrives early. A boy in Camp-1E dreams of becoming an engineer, a girl wants to study law “to speak for the Rohingya”, another hopes to start an online school for refugees—none of these ambitions is fanciful, they’re simply unsourced.

The dream–reality gap: Ask children what they hope to become and the answers spill out: doctor, teacher, engineer, nurse, social worker, lawyer, translator, journalist, coder, football coach, diplomat. They want to heal and build, to represent and protect.

Yet the bridge from aspiration to ability is missing planks. “The biggest challenge is that what children learn and what they dream of are completely disconnected,” one of us noted after observing a science class delivered without a single experiment. A teacher apologised: “It’s all imaginary.” In another centre, “digital skills” meant reading about keyboards from a photocopy because the room had no power for weeks.

When schooling is spotty or hollow, a dangerous vacuum opens — and it fills quickly.

When school disappears, risk takes over: Parents described the same pattern everywhere. When centres close or cut hours, children drift. Some take odd jobs — carrying goods for shops, repairing solar panels, day labour to top up rations. Others are pulled towards riskier activities that families openly fear. “When schools closed, children started doing child labour,” says Abdul Salam, a father in Camp-3. “Some get into trouble. I wish they could learn again. Learning keeps them good.”

Girls pay the highest price. Without the routine and networks of school, pressure for early marriage rises. “If my daughter can study, she will not marry early,” says Noor Jahan in Camp-2. “School gives her a voice.” Fatema, a mother of three, sees her daughter’s light dimming: “When I see my daughter reading, it feels like light in the darkness. But now her school is closed again. I’m scared her light will fade.” A girl’s single greatest protective factor against early marriage is being enrolled in school. With centres closing, a surge in child marriage is inevitable.

Yusuf, 15, is already working. “I stopped going to school after it closed. Now I fix small solar panels. I miss school, but I need to help my family buy food.” Yusuf’s story is not an exception—it’s the new rule. As education access disappears, rates of child labour would spike significantly. This is how a lost generation is made — not in one dramatic moment, but in thousands of small surrenders to necessity.

Teachers keeping hope alive — on almost nothing: Amid shuttered classrooms, a quiet resistance endures. In narrow alleys, community teachers run makeshift schools in their own shelters. In Camp-5, a former teacher had converted his hut into a classroom. About twenty children sat cross-legged, reciting the English alphabet while rain bled through a patched ceiling. “Even without books and desks,” he told us, “we have hearts that believe in learning.”

But belief is not a policy. Teachers are over-stretched and under-recognised. “In my centre, there are more than 12 registers I need to update,” says Hamidur Rahman. “If I start updating them, I have no time to teach.” Many are called “volunteers” rather than professionals. “What we need most is teacher training and recognition,” says Fauzia in Camp-3. “We are the ones keeping learning alive.” Another teacher, Abed Ullah, described the strain plainly: “Please make teachers happy by paying the salary we deserve as humans.”

Volunteerism is admirable. It cannot carry an entire education system.

What is a must-do — an emergency path forward: The scale of this crisis demands triage. Given the severe lack of resources, the focus must shift from building a perfect system to funding the absolute essentials. Based on what we saw and heard, a realistic emergency agenda is clear:

(1) Stabilise Core Funding: Education cannot be the first cut in humanitarian budgets. Donors must create a non-negotiable, protected fund dedicated to keeping existing learning centres open and paying teachers.

(2) Pay and Retain Teachers: Ensure reliable, basic stipends for the Rohingya and Bangladeshi teachers. They are the entire system’s frontline. Without them, nothing is possible.

(3) Resource Community Schools: Actively support the community-run schools with micro-grants and core materials (books, pencils, boards). This is a low-cost, high-impact way to support the community’s own efforts.

(4) Invest in “Good Enough” Infrastructure: Forget high-tech solutions. The basics are what matter: materials to make shelters weather-resistant (heat-reflective roofing, raised floors) and ensuring safe, private sanitation to keep adolescent girls in school.

These steps aren’t a complete solution. They’re the minimum investment needed to keep an entire generation from being permanently lost. For Bangladesh, investing in education in the camps is an investment in stability: structured learning reduces risks that flourish in idleness — crime, trafficking, health burdens, and tensions with host communities. Security analysts have repeatedly warned that a generation of uneducated, idle, and hopeless young people living in confinement is the single-greatest recruitment pool for criminal gangs and extremist networks. The long-term cost of leaving refugee populations uneducated is immense, resulting in lost productivity and increased social- service burdens that create a significant and avoidable drain on a host country’s economy. For donors, predictable funding now prevents unmanageable costs later — humanitarian, social, and moral.

We don’t want to be forgotten: Ask children for a last word and they answer with quiet steadiness.

“I want to be a teacher,” says Hamida, 16, in Camp-1E. “I want to teach other girls like me who still stay at home.”

A boy in Camp-1E dreams of engineering “to rebuild our schools.”

A girl in Camp-3 wants to study law “to speak for the Rohingya to the world.”

Younger students talk about becoming doctors, nurses, coders, journalists — and starting “an online school for refugees.”

These aren’t fantasies. They’re plans, waiting for a pathway.

School, for these children, isn’t just about books. It’s safety, dignity, and the only route past barbed wire into a life with choices. “When I look out at the world outside my camp and they attend school,” says 16-year-old Hafiz Ullah, “I think we are different. I don’t think we’re equal.”

Equality begins with a classroom that does not leak, a timetable that does not vanish, and a teacher who is respected. Nineteen-year-old Mohammed Arfath wants to be a teacher — but his school is closed. His plea is the last word:

“We don’t want to be forgotten.”

Asad Islam is a Professor of Economics at Monash University. His co-author, Ata Ullah, is a Rohingya refugee student, researcher, and community advocate living in the Kutupalong camp. He is the founder of the NextGen Rohingya Network (NGRN) and a student in the Refugee Higher Education Access Program (RhEAP) through BRAC University.

asadul.islam@monash.edu

[To protect the safety of interviewees, all names of students, parents, and teachers in this article have been changed]