Preparation and Response to COVID-19
UNICEF is ensuring that children and families have access to critical information to know how to protect themselves and their communities from COVID-19 infection.
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As the COVID-19 threat became apparent in the spring of 2020, UNICEF and its partners took numerous preventive and precautionary measures to minimize the risks for Rohingya and Bangladeshi children and families, while ensuring that critical activities continue to the maximum extent possible including risk communication and community engagement, health care, nutrition, protection and WASH services.
Risk Communication and Community Engagement
UNICEF is ensuring that children and families have access to critical information to know how to protect themselves and their communities from COVID-19 infection.
UNICEF partners are disseminating information through a network of 650 trained community mobilizers including religious leaders and volunteers to ensure that children and families understand the symptoms of the disease, ways to prevent transmission and where to seek healthcare.
UNICEF partners use radio broadcasts, videos, messaging and leaflets in Rohingya, Burmese and Bengali languages to share information on COVID-19 to Rohingya and Bangladeshi communities.
1,146 Islamic Centres in the host community are engaging people across the district through mosque-based messaging in coordination with the Islamic Foundation of Cox’s Bazar, reaching 1.9 million people. In the refugee camps, 860,000 people have been reached through mosque-based messaging.
In addition, Rohingya volunteer teachers are amplifying hygiene promotion and handwashing messages during small awareness sessions with parents and caregivers at household levels as learning centres are closed due to COVID-19 mitigation measures.
Hygiene Promotion
UNICEF is stepping up regular hygiene promotion activities in the camps, ensuring safe water, sanitation and soap supplies are readily available for 240,000 Rohingya refugees – over half of whom are children - in eight refugee camps.
UNICEF Hygiene Promotion partners are teaching children about handwashing with soap, health and hygiene through games and child-focused learning. Children are encouraged to become advocates for disease prevention and control at home and in their community.
Shared water and sanitation facilities pose risks for COVID-19 disease transmission in the Rohingya refugee camps. UNICEF’s partners are disinfecting community areas, including water pumps, latrines and bathing cubicles to keep communities safe.
Scaling up Health Services
UNICEF is working closely with the Government of Bangladesh and Health Sector to scale up health services as part of COVID-19 preparedness and response efforts in Cox’s Bazar.
UNICEF is establishing a 200 bed COVID-19 Isolation and Treatment Centre for patients from Bangladeshi and Rohingya communities as part of the Health Sector’s overall goal to increase bed capacity throughout the district.
UNICEF is supporting government efforts to scale up health services in Cox’s Bazar District for host communities – providing equipment, medicine and supplies for the Isolation and Treatment Centres in Ramu and Chakaria.
UNICEF continues to provide essential primary health care in the Rohingya refugee camps through 14 health facilities serving close to 185,000 Rohingya refugees – over half of whom are children. This includes five primary health care centres which offer 24/7 care including safe delivery.
Nutrition
UNICEF is continuing to provide essential services for severely malnourished Rohingya children, who may be at higher risk of complications if they contract COVID-19.
Over 40 per cent of Rohingya households do not eat frequently enough and lack food diversity, while 11 per cent of Rohingya children under five years of age suffer from acute malnutrition.
UNICEF partners continue to provide screening, treatment and follow up care for severely malnourished children at 27 nutrition centres supported jointly by UNICEF and the World Food Programme.
Parents of severely malnourished children are provided with enough Ready to Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF) for children one month at a time, instead of one week, to reduce the number of visits to the nutrition centre. However, severely malnourished children continue to receive follow up visits once every two weeks to ensure they are making progress.
11 per cent of Rohingya children under five years of age suffer from acute malnutrition.
Previously, Community Nutrition Volunteers screened 135,000 children between six months and five years for malnutrition each month. However, due to COVID-19 prevention measures and reduced humanitarian access to the camps, this screening has stopped.
In response, UNICEF is training the volunteers to conduct case detection of acute malnutrition and support their community during this crisis. Rohingya mothers and adolescent girls are trained by community nutrition volunteers to measure their children/siblings’ mid-upper arms using a colour coded tape which indicates the severity of malnutrition.
This approach has yielded positive results, new admissions saw a fourfold increase in mid-May compared to the early stages of the lockdown in March 2020. UNICEF is now scaling up this programme to train more mothers and caregivers while the movement of aid workers to the camps remains restricted due to COVID-19 mitigation measures.
Child Protection
For UNICEF, children must remain a priority during this unprecedented pandemic – regardless of their status, where they come from, or where they live. A child is a child.
Children will face heightened risks of neglect, exploitation and abuse as they find themselves outside of education and normal routines, with parents who may struggle to cope. Children must be protected.
UNICEF’s network of almost 2,000 partners and volunteers continue to deliver child protection messaging to children and their families and conduct child protection monitoring of children at increased risk of violence, exploitation, abuse and neglect.
UNICEF partners are giving protection services including case management, counselling and psychosocial support for children, women and girls and survivors of gender-based violence to help them cope with increased fear, anxiety and the repercussions of this pandemic.
Although activities at UNICEF facilities including Safe Spaces for Women and Girls and Multipurpose Adolescent and Child Centres are temporarily suspended, the facilities remain available for individual counselling sessions and to share COVID-19 related information with the community.
As the increasingly protracted situation for Rohingya refugees becomes compounded by the global pandemic, protecting children – especially girls and children with disabilities – from violence, trafficking and other dangers remains a critical issue in the camps.
Education
Prior to the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, UNICEF and its partners ensured access to learning for about 216,000 Rohingya children enrolled in 2,500 learning centres.
In 2020, UNICEF was due to enter a major new phase for education for Rohingya refugee children. Following a landmark decision by the Government of Bangladesh, UNICEF was on the verge of introducing the Myanmar curriculum on a pilot basis in the first half of 2020. Unfortunately, the rollout is now on hold as all learning centres remain temporarily shuttered as a precautionary measure due to COVID-19.
When the pilot is finally introduced, it will initially target 10,000 Rohingya students from grades six to nine. It will then be expanded to other grades in a phased manner. The pilot targets older children, who currently have less access to education compared to their younger counterparts.
School and Learning Centre closures
The Government of Bangladesh announced a decision to close schools nationally in mid-March 2020 to minimize the risk of COVID-19 transmission in communities. Learning Centres in the Rohingya refugee camps are temporarily closed in alignment with this decision.
This could have a lasting impact for years to come, especially on the most vulnerable communities. We know from previous emergency experiences, the longer children remain out of school, the less likely they are to return.
UNICEF is urgently finding alternative pathways for Rohingya children to continue to learn. UNICEF has mobilized its network of Rohingya teachers to disseminate critical messages on health and hygiene, in addition to guidelines for parents and caregivers to support learning for Rohingya children.
Education partners are providing pictorial books, audio messages and workbooks to support caregiver led home-based learning.
However, literacy levels pose a significant challenge. If parents are uneducated, they are less likely to be in a position to guide their children’s learning. Many Rohingya parents are illiterate, so it is difficult to ensure systematic learning through the caregiver led home-based education.
The use of low-cost technology options such as interactive radio instructions to deliver pre-recorded lessons to children are alternatives under discussion. UNICEF continues to search for the best way to deliver education to Rohingya children, while adapting to the unprecedented situation triggered by COVID-19.
Building bridges with the Bangladeshi host community
As the humanitarian response continues, it has become increasingly important to provide services that build bridges with the local community, protect children’s health and nutrition, and offer safe water and sanitation.
The arrival of Rohingya refugees has placed stress on Cox’s Bazar district which already had some of the worst indicators for children’s well-being in Bangladesh. As a result, UNICEF and other agencies have paid close attention to local community needs as they responded to the refugee emergency.
These efforts included screening children for acute malnutrition, constructing deep wells to provide safe water and providing health consultations for thousands of young children in government facilities and community clinics. UNICEF supports five specialized newborn care units in Cox’s Bazar district to provide care for sick newborns.
UNICEF has also expanded the Child Protection programme in Cox’s Bazar creating Multipurpose Child and Adolescent Centres for thousands of Bangladeshi adolescents, to learn life skills, literacy, numeracy, and pre-vocational skills in a safe protective environment. UNICEF strengthened Community Based Child Protection Committees comprised of parents, community leaders and partners which serve as frontline community monitoring and reporting mechanisms to prevent protection issues such as child marriage, abuse and exploitation. UNICEF is supporting all government primary schools in Cox’s Bazar District, providing school effectiveness grants to help school management committees implement improvement plans. These grants are supporting almost 220,000 students from 662 primary schools.
Looking ahead
Three years after hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees sought safety in Cox's Bazar, the immense humanitarian effort led by the Government of Bangladesh and supported by a host of generous donors, has stabilized conditions in the Rohingya camps.
However, the task is by no means over and it is made all the more complicated by the dangers posed by COVID-19. Rohingya children and their families are still dependent on humanitarian relief for their daily survival and wellbeing.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, UNICEF and its partners along with other aid agencies were addressing the basic day-to-day needs of the Rohingya population. But providing for their longer-term needs – especially the educational needs of children and young people – remains a major challenge which needs the full support of the international community.
In the long term, it is not sustainable for so many people to live in such cramped conditions where the threat of disease outbreaks, cyclones, flooding and landslides remain high.
Ultimately, the solution to the crisis lies in Myanmar. Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh have repeatedly expressed their hope and desire to voluntarily return to their homes in Myanmar, safely and with dignity, to live in peace and harmony with their neighbours as full members of the society. UNICEF calls on the Government of Myanmar to establish conditions that would allow such a return as soon as possible.
UNICEF advocates for the rights of Rohingya children and their families to be recognized to enable them to reach their potential and preserve their hopes for a better future.
