DHAKA: Bangladesh is unable to allocate additional resources for the growing number of Rohingya refugees, the country’s leader said on Monday, as he called on the international community to deliver on UN commitments to address the crisis.
The chief of Bangladesh’s interim government, Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, was addressing a two-day conference in Cox’s Bazar, held by the Bangladeshi government ahead of a high-level meeting at the UN General Assembly in September.
It comes eight years after hundreds of thousands of Rohingya were forced to flee a military crackdown in Myanmar and take shelter in neighboring Bangladesh.
Today, more than 1.3 million Rohingya are cramped inside 33 camps in the Cox’s Bazar district on the country’s southeast coast, making it the world’s largest refugee settlement.
While the number of refugees arriving from Myanmar has increased by some 150,000 since last year, international aid is dwindling. The latest Joint Response Plan for the Rohingya Humanitarian Crisis in Bangladesh has only 36 percent funding from the requested 2025-26 amount of nearly $935 million.
