Statement by UNFPA Executive Director Dr. Natalia Kanem

Seven years after the Rohingya people were driven from their homes in Myanmar, close to one million remain stranded in the refugee camps of Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district – over half of them women and girls.  Their current and future prospects are far from certain.

When I visited the camps in 2018, the women I met were haunted by the unspeakable acts of sexual violence they had endured – and barely survived. I met with women again this week at a women-friendly space in Camp 9 – one of 56 such spaces UNFPA and its partners are supporting across the camps. They told me they now feel more empowered to speak out against sexual violence; their husbands and sons are starting to listen; and they know how to access medical treatment, counselling and legal services when abhorrent incidents do occur.  The spaces, they said, bring them hope and happiness amid difficult living conditions in the densely populated camps. I also met midwives who said the number of women using family planning had steadily increased over recent years.

At the Friendship Hospital in Balukhali, adjacent to the camps – the only facility serving Rohingya refugees and host communities that can manage complicated obstetric emergencies, including c-sections and blood transfusions – I saw first-hand how the skills of trained midwives are saving lives. Since 2019, the number of women giving birth in health facilities has doubled, reaching 85 percent, thanks in large part to the efforts of UNFPA and its partners, who facilitated more than 10,600 safe births in 2023 alone.

Yet amid this hope, there is an underlying fear. With conflict mounting across the border in Myanmar, women spoke of their anxiety that husbands and sons will be recruited to fight. Shrinking humanitarian funding, and an increase in security incidents in the camps, have left them more exposed to violence. With no means of earning a legal income, and given that food rations are directly impacted by funding shortages, refugees are also resorting to increasingly desperate measures to survive. There are reports of forced early marriage – one in ten Rohingya girls is married as a child. Women and girls told me they are worried about how they will feed and support their families, with less food available and crime on the rise.

Given dangerous shortfalls in funding, UNFPA’s services, a lifeline for Rohingya women and girls and host communities, are also under threat.

In 2024, UNFPA needs $31 million to provide sexual and reproductive health and gender-based violence prevention and response services in the camps. To date our response is only 42% funded. With additional and sufficient funding UNFPA will be able to establish more safe spaces, train more young people, extend our counselling services, and support more midwives with health supplies and equipment.

I left the camps at Cox’s Bazar with a clear message for the international community: I urge you to renew your financial commitment to the Rohingya refugees as they continue to live lives marked by uncertainty and fear. Greater, more flexible and sustained funding is critical for both UNFPA and our UN agency partners to provide services for women and girls that can quite literally mean the difference between life and death.