Aid Groups Face Challenges in Educating Rohingya Refugee Children

The students are all Rohingya refugees who fled to Bangladesh from neighboring Myanmar. Nine-year-old Ruksana says she hopes to become a teacher herself one day. But her current instructor, as hard as he tries, is not really qualified for the job.

Shamsuddin, a 21-year-old Rohingya refugee himself, says he has only completed high school, which is a common situation for many of the teachers in the refugee camps.

The unqualified teachers are just one of the problems when it comes to educating the child refugees, which also include too little classroom time and not enough classrooms.

More than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled from Myanmar’s Rakhine State to neighboring Bangladesh since a military crackdown in August 2017. United Nations investigators have said the operation was conducted with “genocidal intent.” Myanmar denies the accusations and says its security forces ran a legitimate counter-terrorism campaign after attacks by Rohingya militants.