Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
The time to act is now. There is a finite window of opportunity to embed medium-term approaches before international attention wanes further and donor fatigue results in even greater funding shortfalls.
While Bangladesh and Myanmar have recently attempted small-scale repatriation, these efforts have failed as refugees refused to go back, fearing for their safety. Conditions in Myanmar’s Rakhine State continue to deteriorate, and UN agencies have been denied full access to areas of return. Despite this, planning so far has been short-term and focused on aid rather than medium-term economic, environmental, and human development approaches.
Bangladesh is hosting more than a million Rohingya refugees, and businesses have a critical role to play in improving the situation for them and their Bangladeshi host communities. We have identified four viable areas for business investment and procurement in Cox’s Bazar, the historically under-developed region that is hosting the Rohingya refugees.
Meaningful progress on the goal of reducing global extreme poverty requires meeting the development needs of vulnerable populations in fragile contexts; but assistance in these contexts has traditionally been limited to short-term humanitarian aid, ill-equipped to address underlying development challenges.
Bangladesh provides a significant global public good by hosting over one million Rohingya refugees. Most are living in camps in Cox’s Bazar district, where resources and livelihoods are strained. The refugee situation is likely to be protracted, and medium-term planning is critical.
To contribute to a growing base of knowledge and expertise on opportunities to reverse the specific effects of forest loss and degradation—and to improve the conditions of host populations and refugees in Cox’s Bazar—BRAC, the Center for Global Development, and The Nature Conservancy convened workshops with global and national experts and stakeholders in September 2018 in Cox’s Bazar.
There are now one million Rohingya refugees in Cox's Bazar, comprising about 30 percent of the population. This increase, coupled with immediate needs for fuelwood and shelter, has diminished livelihoods due to deforestation and loss of access to land; soil and slope erosion; fuelwood scarcity and associated risks to safety of people collecting fuelwood; increased encroachment and forest degradation; declining water quality, groundwater reserve depletion, and air pollution; decreasing soil quality; and climate vulnerability.
With this year’s Women Deliver Conference underway in Vancouver, we assess critical gaps in sexual and reproductive health and rights care in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.
Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) face severe economic challenges. Which policy and programmatic approaches will be most effective in supporting IDPs to overcome these challenges and make progress toward self-reliance depends in part on the urban-rural composition of IDP populations. By analysing the existing known locations of IDPs in developing countries, we show that there is large variation in urban-rural IDP compositions across countries.
Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) face severe economic challenges. Which policy and programmatic approaches will be most effective in supporting IDPs to overcome these challenges and make progress toward self-reliance depends in part on the urban-rural composition of IDP populations. By analysing the existing known locations of IDPs in developing countries and visualizing them in an interactive map, we show that there is large variation in urban-rural IDP compositions across countries.
Bangladesh is providing a significant global public good by hosting nearly one million Rohingya refugees, including 700,000 who fled violence carried out with “genocidal intent” in 2017. The international community has an opportunity to recognize Bangladesh’s contributions through a robust responsibility-sharing process. This brief explores the potential range of responsibility-sharing commitments in support of Bangladesh.
For too long, the international community has accepted the convenient fiction that refugee crises are temporary.
Many of the world’s 25 million refugees spend years struggling to provide for themselves or contribute fully to their host economies because they are legally barred from working or owning businesses. Granting refugees formal labor market access unlocks a range of benefits—for refugees, hosts, and global businesses.
Refugees can be immense economic contributors to the host communities where they settle, but to maximize their contributions, refugees need formal labor market access.
There are over 25 million refugees in the world today and most of them—especially those in developing countries—do not have formal labor market access (LMA). Granting refugees formal LMA has the potential to create substantial benefits for refugees and their hosts.
An economic, political, and humanitarian crisis has driven more than one million Venezuelans across the border into Colombia in the past year. Countries hosting Venezuelans have done so with relative welcome, keeping their borders open and offering some services and protection to migrants. But additional significant financial and other support will be required to meet the needs of both migrants and hosts.
Ten months after the onset of the crisis, Bangladesh is home to the largest refugee settlement in the world. So what comes next? How should Bangladesh and the international community respond to this new phase of Rohingya displacement in Bangladesh for which Bangladesh is bearing far more than its fair share?
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