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Bangladesh·Human Rights·Migration

Child marriage surges 21 percent among Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh as aid cuts shutter schools

Saturday, 4 July 2026, 06:22 · 1 min read

Child marriage among Rohingya refugees in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh (home to nearly one million stateless Rohingya living across 33 overcrowded camps) has risen 21 percent in the past year, according to humanitarian data, with aid cuts widely blamed for accelerating the crisis. The closure of UNICEF-supported learning centres following US funding cuts in 2025 left tens of thousands of girls without structured activity or supervision, and UNICEF's child protection manager Patrick Halton directly linked the spike in marriages to the resulting school shutdowns. The collapse of protection mechanisms is compounded by the near-total impunity within camps — marriages routinely bypass official age-verification processes, religious framing presents puberty as the threshold for marriage, and community leaders who control food distribution sometimes leverage that power to press families into accepting proposals for their daughters.

Sources
Global VoicesNo safety, no way out: The Rohingya girls caught between aid cuts and child marriage in Bangladesh ↗︎
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