Rohingya children play under a half-mangled roof of twisted tin sheets as the rain beats down on the Bangladeshi refugee camp that has become their home. Their sodden playground was a fully functioning health clinic before a monsoon landslide forced staff and patients to abandon it in June. Its replacement – a simple tent – is a fraction of the size, humid, and has no electricity.
Gonoshasthaya Kendra, the local NGO that runs the clinic, doesn’t have the money to repair it so it is seeking help from a large international aid agency that does. But the two organisations can’t strike a deal on the upgrade. For now, it sits in disrepair, while in the tent nearby frustrated medics listen to Rohingya patients perched on plastic chairs in the 35-degree heat.
“This situation’s sad for me. It’s sad for all of us,” says Papi, the clinic’s doctor, pointing to the damaged, empty clinic. “We’re not getting enough support.”
This feeling of not being supported is representative of a larger friction between the local and international aid groups that work in the packed Rohingya refugee camps of southern Bangladesh.
Local aid groups and volunteers were the first to respond last August as a military crackdown in Myanmar’s Rakhine State drove more than 700,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh. Today, however, locals are dwarfed by dozens of international aid agencies – who dominate donor funding and the response itself.
Prominent Bangladeshi NGOs say they lack the resources that could sustain and grow local aid expertise, their staff are often poached by big international aid groups, and they’ve been excluded from decision-making in an emergency unfolding on their own soil.
However, as the Rohingya refugee crisis moves into its second year, local aid groups believe that international attention – and donor funding – will wane, and that the plethora of international organisations and staff that now dominate the response will inevitably shrink.
“In the course of time, some day, there will be no aid, or reduced aid,” said Rezaul Chowdhury, the head of COAST, an NGO from Cox’s Bazar that has spearheaded efforts to even out a donor system it sees as lopsided in favour of the larger, international players.
“The Rohingya will (still) be there. So why don’t we take the responsibility for Rohingya from now on?”
Nearly 100 NGOs and UN agencies now operate in the camps – more than two-thirds of them are international groups, such as the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, or its migration arm, IOM, the two lead aid agencies for the Rohingya response.
Local aid officials here speak of a power imbalance in relationships with their international counterparts.
Sultan Mahmud, who leads Gonoshasthaya Kendra’s Rohingya programmes, says his group’s destroyed health clinic is a prime example.
UNHCR is happy to help, in principle, but it wants Gonoshasthaya Kendra to also expand the clinic’s services. Mahmud says his staff may not have the resources to do this, and the most immediate concern is maintaining the clinic so that it at least stays open.
“They say there is partnership, but it is not equal partnership,” Mahmud said.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in aid funds have been pledged to help the refugees. But local aid organisations like Gonoshasthaya Kendra see only a trickle of this funding, which is largely filtered from international donors down through UN agencies and big international NGOs.
Bangladeshi organisations have valuable local knowledge, but this imbalanced relationship has limited their contributions, says Smruti Patel, co-founder of the Global Mentoring Initiative, an organisation that studies the role local organisations play in humanitarian crises.
She described the partnership between international and local NGOs as a “subcontracting” relationship – a characterisation commonly voiced by both Bangladeshi and foreign aid workers here.
“(Local NGOs’) value is that they have access to communities, they are really connected, they know what the issues are,” she said. “But we don’t value that.”
And just as Bangladeshi organisations are demanding a greater say over a crisis in their own country, the Rohingya refugees themselves are largely unable to participate in decisions that affect them – whether that’s humanitarian aid in the camps or the controversial prospect of eventual returns to Myanmar.
Patel says Rohingya perspectives are sorely missing from the discussions.
“There are so many issues where they should have a voice but they don’t and the Rohingya are not even present,” said Patel. “Everything is being decided for them, but nothing with them.”
Criticism of international dominance in the aid sector is not new. But last year’s Rohingya refugee crisis erupted a little over a year after dozens of the world’s largest donors and aid groups pledged to reform the aid sector, in part by putting more power in the hands of local aid workers, organisations, and governments to play a leading role in crises around the world.
In Bangladesh, local aid leaders believed the Rohingya emergency would be an opportunity to implement these changes. A year later, they’re still waiting.
“We’re still hoping for the best, but, truly speaking, it is not happening,” said COAST’s Chowdhury, one of the most outspoken proponents of aid reform in Cox’s Bazar.
A December 2017 briefing by the Humanitarian Advisory Group estimated that local NGOs had seen only 4% of total aid funds directed toward the crisis – far short of the aid sector’s global commitments to boost local funding to 25%.
At the same time, only one local group has a leadership role in co-ordinating the various humanitarian sectors in the camps; out of 21 co-ordination positions, just one is held by a local NGO – Mukti, a Cox’s Bazar-based group that co-leads the food security sector.
Luc Soenen, who co-ordinates water, sanitation, and shelter efforts in Asia for ECHO, the European Commission’s aid arm, says the humanitarian response during the Rohingya crisis has been “Western-led and oriented”.
“It’s a shame,” he said. “All or most of the management of the response is by us. Local implementers… aren’t involved enough.”
Major international donors direct the bulk of aid funds through UN agencies or big international groups – and ECHO is no exception. EU rules mean that ECHO is only allowed to directly contract organisations based in Europe, which rules out most local aid groups from the start.
“It seems like when the money comes from abroad, we give ourselves the right to manage it, to decide about it,” he said.
Some in the aid community say progress has been made in redressing the imbalance, but argue that the intense pressure created by the scale of last year’s Rohingya influx means that helping local groups build up skills and take on more responsibilities has taken a back seat.
Manuel Marques Pereira, the IOM’s emergency co-ordinator in Cox’s Bazar, said the organisation has helped train local groups on reducing disaster risks and upgrading shelters.
“IOM believes that this empowerment process is vital, but it is a slow process,” Pereira said, adding that the IOM had directed more than $4.5mn towards other aid groups, mostly Bangladeshi NGOs, over the past year.
Today, Bangladesh’s sprawling refugee camps are covered with the logos of donors and humanitarian groups: plastered onto the sides of clinics, makeshift schools, stockpiles of aid items, and boldly coloured signposts announcing donor-funded projects often miles away.
But in the early days of last year’s Rohingya exodus, only a handful of international agencies were working in the camps. As thousands, then tens of thousands of refugees surged into Bangladesh, it was local responders – volunteers from nearby communities, local NGOs and civil society groups, and Bangladeshi authorities – who first rushed to help in large numbers.
And for Bangladeshis here, the refugee inflow is not viewed as a temporary crisis, but as a long-term emergency that has played out over decades.
“We’re not only helping this time; we’ve helped since 1978,” said Syed Saliheen, a local interpreter at a clinic for pregnant Rohingya women run by COAST, referring to a previous military crackdown in Myanmar that sent an estimated 200,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh.
“If we have only a little land and some tarpaulin, we give it to them for shelter,” he said. “Whatever we have, we give them. If we don’t have it, we try to raise money. Whenever something happens to them, it’s us who have to help.”
Locals like Saliheen still form the backbone of the response today. They are doctors, healthcare workers, teachers, social workers, interpreters – the local Chittagonian dialect spoken here is similar to the language spoken by the Rohingya.
They view themselves as the common thread throughout multiple refugee influxes, and expect to remain linked to the Rohingya long after staff at international aid agencies have moved on.
With the monsoon rain beating down on the roof, a Bangladeshi doctor in the clinic tries to communicate with a Rohingya patient. Unable to explain the medical terms, she turns to Saliheen.
When he first started interpreting, Saliheen says he struggled with some of the terminology used in the clinic. The Rohingya word for pregnancy, hamil, came from Arabic rather than the Bengali dialect used in Cox’s Bazar.
“So I write the words down and talk to old Rohingya who know a bit of Bengali,” he says.
The clinic had earlier been staffed by foreign doctors, but COAST soon hired its own staff – a situation made possible because of its local field workers and their language skills.
“At the beginning, it was difficult for us, but now it’s OK,” Saliheen says. “We’ve learned.”


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