No safety, no way out: The Rohingya girls caught between aid cuts and child marriage in Bangladesh

July 3, 2026

In Bangladesh's Cox's Bazar refugee camps, nearly one million stateless Rohingya refugees face a devastating surge in child marriage following 2025 USAID funding cuts that forced school closures. Girls as young as 13 are being married off to much older men, often powerful community leaders who control food distribution and camp resources, with dowry costs dropping to as low as $16 compared to thousands of dollars in Myanmar. The collapse of educational programs, combined with extreme poverty, debt burdens, religious justifications citing puberty as marriageability, and the camp ration system that enables polygamy without financial burden, has created conditions where families view child marriage as their only option for daughters' survival.

Who is affected

Rohingya refugee girls and women in Cox's Bazar camps (specifically mentioned: Maryam, age 14 and pregnant; Fatima, age 14, married to a majhee in his mid-fifties)
Nearly one million Rohingya refugees living in 33 camps in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh
Widowed mothers managing households alone (specifically Maryam's mother and Suriya)
Teachers at UNICEF learning centers who have lost students
Children recruited by armed groups (560 reported abduction cases in 2025)
Over 62 percent of Rohingya women in camps who were married before age 18
Younger children in families where older sisters are married off

What action is being taken

New learning centers are slowly reopening in some areas near the camps
UNICEF has downscaled education programs due to funding cuts
Camp-in-Charge (CiC) offices have approval processes and age verification requirements on paper (though these are widely evaded in practice)
Around 1,000 madrashahs are operating across the 33 camps providing religious education
Majhees are preparing marriage contracts and controlling food distribution and marriage registration

Why it matters

This crisis demonstrates how statelessness strips people of fundamental protections and creates conditions where children become tradable resources for survival. The situation reveals the catastrophic human consequences of international funding cuts, showing how the removal of educational opportunities directly accelerates child marriage, gender-based violence, and exploitation. The systemic nature of the problem—where powerful men control resources and use marriage to consolidate power, where religious justifications normalize child marriage, and where monitoring systems fail operationally—means these girls face irreversible harm including early pregnancy, denial of education, and normalized marital violence. The crisis also exposes how humanitarian systems can inadvertently worsen outcomes when camp ration systems remove economic barriers to polygamy and enable exploitation by those in power, while the international community that created these conditions through funding cuts has yet to acknowledge its role.

What's next

No explicit next steps stated in the article

Read full article from source: Global Voices