Rethinking Rohingya “Aid Dependency”
Essay for Creshendo
I was invited by Creshendo, a nonprofit working on refugee inclusion and community-driven approaches to displacement, to write a short essay on the Rohingya response in Bangladesh. Creshendo focuses on empowering displaced people, particularly women and youth, and argues that refugees should be seen not as passive recipients of aid but as agents capable of shaping their futures.
You can read my essay here:
My article takes that premise and applies it to a difficult reality. Nearly nine years after fleeing genocide, one million-plus Rohingya refugees remain confined to camps where legal work, mobility, and economic integration are tightly restricted.
In that time, the humanitarian system has normalised a model of managed dependency. As WFP now introduces tiered food rations, the contradiction becomes clearer - refugees are described as “100 per cent dependent,” yet the system quietly assumes they are already coping through informal work and remittances. The piece argues that dependency in the Rohingya camps is not a natural condition - it is a policy choice.
The essay draws on a growing body of research that complicates the narrative of total dependency. Surveys by Human Rights Watch and the Norwegian Refugee Council have long found that large numbers of Rohingya refugees work informally in and around the camps despite formal prohibitions. More recently, the World Bank and UNHCR’s labour market study “Two Settlements, Two Diverging Paths” shows that roughly one-third of working-age Rohingya had worked in the previous year. A policy brief by Mohammad Salehin and Mizanur Rahman for the Peace Research Institute Oslo also outlines practical ways regulated camp-based livelihoods could reduce aid dependency without creating major “pull factors.”
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Great article. The PRIO brief has actionable solutions- hope they will apply them immediately!