Mapping Health Facilities in Rohingya Refugee Camps

Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh

By Binita Zaman
rohingya, refugees, healthcare, humanitarian

This map explores healthcare facilities for the Rohingya population in the refugee camps of Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh.

The Rohingya people are an ethnic minority originating from Myanmar. For years, the Rohingya have been subjected to systematic persecution, torture and mass killings from the Myanmar army and Buddhist extremists. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees were — and still are — forced to flee to neighboring Bangladesh, a lower middle income country with no national framework put in place to protect refugees.

Living in one of the largest refugee camps in the world, Rohingya refugees unfortunately have limited access to legal work, education, healthcare and other human rights while being vulnerable to repatriation and detention. COVID-19 has only exacerbated conditions as the Rohingya now face heightened food insecurity, loss of income, and disrupted learning for adolescents, and the overcrowded camps make it virtually impossible to maintain physical distance.

For my project, in light of the current pandemic, I wanted to explore the health facilities within the refugee camps. My intention was to also incorporate COVID-19 data for the Rohingya but could not do so due to limitations. Nonetheless, I hope that this tool can serve as an introduction to the issue of refugee and migrant health, the concept of statelessness, and the Rohingya refugee crisis as a whole.

Users can see how many refugees reside in each specific camp and the surrounding health facilities. The webpage also provides an index for the abbreviations used throughout the map, list of data sources, and additional resources on the Rohingya refugee crisis, statelessness, and refugee/migrant health.