A Helping Hand or A Drop in The Bucket: Evaluating the Efficacy of Foreign Aid for the Rohingya Refugee Crisis in Bangladesh

Abstract

The Rohingya Muslims are an ethic minority group from Myanmar who have been discriminated against and persecuted throughout the country’s history. With over 1.1 million displaced persons because of the Rohingya Crisis, the Rohingya have been declared “the most persecuted minority in the world” and the Rohingya Refugee Crisis has been ranked as the 7th largest refugee crisis to exist. Many Rohingyas have been fleeing the country in search of refuge since the 1970s, and the majority of refugees have found themselves in the refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Cox’s Bazar now hosts over 900,000 refugees in its camps, making it the largest refugee camp in the world. Bangladesh is a lower-middle income developing country that was already overpopulated without the addition of the refugees. Although they accepted the initial waves of refugees because of sympathy for the Rohingya, Bangladesh had quickly overstretched its resources without providing adequate basic needs for the refugees. The socioeconomic conditions of Bangladesh were getting worse, and the country would not be able to sustain themselves and the increasing numbers of refugees without international help. After the 2017 Rohingya genocide, many countries began to increase the amount of humanitarian aid to Bangladesh to help them accommodate the new biggest influx of Rohingya refugees. Three of the biggest state contributors were the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan, who worked with organizations like UNHCR, Red Cross, UNICEF, and other nonprofit organizations. This thesis attempts to answer the question: How effective is foreign aid in providing support for the Rohingya Refugee Crisis in Bangladesh? My initial hypothesis is that foreign aid is not as effective as Bangladesh needs it to be to recover from the refugee crisis. To test this hypothesis, this thesis will use qualitative research methods such as descriptive analysis to look at trends in humanitarian aid to Bangladesh and the effects these had on the refugees, their camps, and host communities. It will then evaluate the efficacy of foreign aid for this refugee crisis based on the observations of socioeconomic conditions in Bangladesh. Although there are some positive and some negative impacts due to humanitarian aid, it does appear that foreign aid offers a net negative impact on host countries and the refugees. It creates competition and animosity between the refugees, as well as competition for jobs and resources between them. The work of humanitarian organizations funded by foreign aid in the host country tends to damage the environment as well. However, foreign aid still needs to be used, otherwise the refugees and locals in Cox’s Bazar would have been much worse off. The policy recommendations I propose in this thesis are to support not only just the refugees with this aid, but also the locals in the host communities, as many have lost land, jobs, and other resources to accommodate the refugees. Other nations and international organizations such as the UN and ASEAN need to band together to negotiate with Myanmar to naturalize the Rohingyas, using soft powers to pressure them to do so, and allow them to repatriate safely and unharmed. Once this has been agreed upon, humanitarian agencies need to work with Bangladesh to help them recover from the negative consequences of hosting refugees so that they are able to eventually develop their country on their own.