Bhasan Char - Education for Rohingya Refugee Children - Donate Today

Bhasan Char island in the Bay of Bengal is home to thousands of Rohingya refugees, who have been relocated from the main camp on the mainland.

Children on the Edge is providing high quality education in a child friendly classrooms for over 500 children, who would otherwise be cut off from learning on this remote island.

6,895 REFUGEE CHILDREN
RECEIVING EDUCATION

75 COLOURFUL LEARNING CENTRES

150 TRAINED ROHINGYA AND BANGLADESHI TEACHERS

Ten year old Nisha is watering plants outside her Learning Centre in Kutupalong. She is wearing bright pink.

JISMA is ten years old and from a village in Myanmar called 'Shoeja', where she had a 'beautiful life'. She played sports, helped her mother and enjoyed the natural world and animals around her.

After her family was tortured, they had to make the difficult journey to Bangladesh, where they now live in the cramped Kutupalong refugee camp and life is very different. Jisma has nightmares and is often unable to sleep.

Jisma attends one of our learning centres and loves to get lost in books. She is happy that she has access to books at school and hopes to become a teacher one day.

The learning centre has helped Jisma to make friends in the camp and she now spends a lot of time with them playing sports.

WORKING ON 'THE EDGE' IN KUTUPALONG

The Rohingya people have faced decades of persecution and attack from the military in Myanmar.
In August 2017, co-ordinated military attacks against them forced 750,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh.
This brutal offensive was described by the UN as ‘a textbook example of ethnic cleansing’.
These refugees arrived directly into the border areas and into Kutupalong refugee camp where we had been working for eight years, providing education for Rohingya refugee children.
Children make up 50% of the refugee community in Kutupalong camp and, despite a wealth of agencies investing in education, currently 500,000 children still lack access and are denied a curriculum in their own language.
Without adequate support, children face the prospect of growing up without an education and with no means to process the horrific events they have lived through.

WHAT WE DO TO HELP

Since 2010 we have been working to provide education and support to Rohingya refugee and slum dwelling children in Bangladesh. Working with our partner organisation, Mukti Cox’s Bazar, we now support 150 classrooms in the Kutupalong camp providing education for nearly 7000 children. 75 colourful learning centres encourage creativity and self expression with digital lessons, plenty of play and basic health support in safe spaces with trusted adults.

Children on the Edge were well placed to respond when the crisis hit in 2017 and hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees fled Myanmar into Bangladesh. Together with Mukti Cox’s Bazar, we worked quickly to construct 75 learning centres in the Kutupalong camp and train 150 Bangladeshi and Rohingya teachers.

Each learning centre has two classrooms, which are colourful spaces with vibrant ‘gardens’ growing outside. Rohingya children benefit from daily access to basic education, play, health inputs, nutritional support and creative opportunities.

Image shows a young female teacher wearing a yellow headscarf and smiling. Behind her is a colourful classroom with lots of artwork on the walls, painted desks and children learning.

Kamrunnahar is a teacher at one of the colourful Learning Centres we support in Kutupalong camp.

Daily digital lessons are projected onto screens in each classroom, to break down language barriers and enable children to genuinely understand and learn. This technology also gives them the opportunity to experience something of life beyond the confines of the camp.

Through ‘Moja Kids’, their own online platform, students create video updates to share back and forth with children outside the camps. This not only gives them a voice and a place to express their talents and creativity, but enables them to interact and tackle their sense of isolation.