Begum, a 35-year-old Rohingya refugee, says she feels some relief after marrying off one of her seven daughters just before funding cuts shuttered her school and thousands of others across Bangladesh’s overcrowded refugee camps – leaving nearly half a million children without classrooms.
Her daughter, the second-born, was 16.
“Without school, girls sit idle. People start talking,” Begum said as her youngest tugged at her headscarf and four other daughters crowded around inside their bamboo shelter in Cox’s Bazar. “I was afraid. Marriage was the only option. I just pray her husband lets her study.”
With her husband battling mental health struggles, Begum asked that her full name not be used, fearing backlash for marrying off her child so young.
Bangladesh now shelters about 1.2 million Rohingya Muslims, roughly half of them children, most of whom fled a brutal military crackdown in Buddhist-majority Myanmar – a campaign U.N. investigators have called a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”
