The plight of the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh has taken a devastating turn as education, one of the few lifelines available to displaced children, is rapidly disappearing. The recent Human Rights Watch (HRW) report documenting the closure of over 6,400 learning centers in the Rohingya refugee camps is not merely an alarm bell-it is a thunderous indictment of international neglect. Approximately 300,000 Rohingya children now face a future without even the most basic access to schooling. This is not only a humanitarian disaster but a looming security and development crisis for the entire region.

The closures are a direct result of foreign aid drying up. What little infrastructure had been built to give these children a semblance of normalcy is being dismantled, brick by brick, leaving behind only despair. But this is more than the loss of buildings; it is the systematic dismantling of hope. For a stateless and persecuted people like the Rohingya, education was the only avenue through which they could imagine a future beyond the barbed-wire confines of the camps in Cox’s Bazar.

The consequences of this collapse are dire and far-reaching. Children deprived of education are far more likely to fall victim to child labor, trafficking, early marriage, and recruitment by extremist groups. In the absence of structured learning and safe spaces, radicalization becomes a plausible outcome-not because the Rohingya are inherently vulnerable to it, but because society has left them with no alternatives. This is the cost of international inaction: not just broken futures, but broken communities, increasingly........

© Blitz