‘Ground zero’ for aid cuts: Rohingya children in Cox’s Bazar face hunger, lost schooling as funding collapses
At a nutrition center in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar, a seven-month-old girl named Ahshiya clings to life. She weighs just 4.7 kilograms—little more than an average one-month-old. Her mother, 21-year-old Sajida Begum, fled Myanmar after soldiers attacked her village and burned their home. Now, inside the world’s largest refugee camp, she is battling HIV, diabetes and dengue fever while trying to keep her daughter fed.
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For weeks, a program run by Concern Worldwide, the Irish humanitarian group, has helped stabilize Ahshiya’s weight. That lifeline, like many others in the sprawling settlement, is at risk of snapping as international aid shrinks. The United Nations has warned that Cox’s Bazar has become “ground zero for the impact of budget cuts,” with a funding shortfall of 50% this year for the Rohingya response.
The consequences are already surfacing. UNICEF reports an 11% rise in children with acute malnutrition between January and September. The World Food Programme has warned it may be forced to cut monthly food rations from $12.50 to $6 per person—less than a dollar a week for essentials.
“We are bracing for a high rate of malnutrition to appear that will lead to the death of the young children,” said Sheikh Shahed Rahman, programme director for Concern Worldwide in Bangladesh. He added that shortages will also hit “the service we are expecting to deliver to the pregnant and breastfeeding mothers.”
The aid squeeze follows sweeping reductions in humanitarian budgets by the United States since President Donald Trump returned to office in January. His administration has also effectively dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, which for decades funded much of the world’s humanitarian and development assistance. While Washington is the largest donor, others are retreating, too; the United Kingdom and France are among European countries that have announced plans to reduce overseas aid.
Few places are as exposed as Cox’s Bazar, home to hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who fled ethnic cleansing in neighboring Myanmar and now depend almost entirely on international support. When food, nutrition and protection services are cut, there is no safety net.
Inside the camp’s aid centers, the shift is unmistakable. Mothers arrive to find thinner ration packages and longer waits; others are told services may not exist next month. Health workers try to stretch supplies they know won’t last. For families like Sajida’s, the message is stark: what little stands between them and crisis is being pared back.
The risk to children extends well beyond hunger. Education is faltering as funds dry up. UNICEF warns that as many as 300,000 children in Cox’s Bazar could be without any learning services next year. For 13-year-old Nur Hares, who loves “history and books” and dreams of becoming a “pilot, teacher and engineer,” the uncertainty is crushing. His learning center is only funded through Dec. 31.
“We know it is hard for all of the UN agencies, we are downsizing dramatically because we just don’t have the funding for the staff,” said UNICEF’s representative to Bangladesh, Rana Flowers. The closures carry immediate protection risks, she noted. “It’s not just child marriage that we’re seeing. Child recruitment within the camps is something that we’re very concerned about. School protects the kids from that, because they are occupied.”
The looming ration cuts underscore how quickly an already fragile situation can deteriorate. A drop from $12.50 to $6 per month forces impossible choices: skip protein, skip vegetables, skip entire meals. Aid groups warn that such a reduction will accelerate wasting in infants and toddlers, undercut gains made in therapeutic feeding programs, and push families into debt or dangerous coping strategies.
Humanitarian workers describe a cascade effect. As nutrition declines, disease spreads more easily in cramped camp conditions. Without classrooms, children are more vulnerable to exploitation. Reduced staffing weakens reporting and referral systems meant to protect at-risk women and girls. Each cut widens the gap between urgent needs and the ability to meet them.
António Guterres’s “ground zero” warning reflects a broader fear across the aid system: that Cox’s Bazar is an early signal of what prolonged budget retrenchment will look like on the ground. The Rohingya have no legal pathway to work, few prospects for safe return to Myanmar, and limited options for resettlement. Without sustained funding, their crisis becomes a test of whether the world will continue to underwrite survival for populations with no alternative.
Aid agencies say the solutions are straightforward but politically difficult: reverse the cuts, restore predictable funding, and protect core services—food, health, water, sanitation and education—until a durable political settlement emerges. In the meantime, they are triaging. Nutrition teams prioritize the youngest and most severely malnourished. Child protection officers try to keep learning spaces open as long as possible. Health workers stockpile essential medicines when they can.
For families, the calculus is immediate. Sajida counts the days until the next distribution, worried that even the small bundle of nutrition supplements that helped her daughter gain weight may soon vanish. She has no cushion to fall back on. Inside an aid center, mothers queue with infants in their arms, hoping that the scales will tick up, that the clinic will still be there next week, that the world will not look away.
Those hopes are colliding with budget lines drawn far from the camp’s bamboo partitions. Unless donors act, the numbers are poised to harden into outcomes: more children falling into acute malnutrition, more classrooms shuttered, more families living on less and less. In Cox’s Bazar, the margin between a difficult life and a catastrophic one is measured in dollars and cents—and it is narrowing fast.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
