More than 1.3 million Rohingya refugees live in camps around Cox’s Bazar and on Bhasan Char island, most having fled Myanmar’s 2017 military crackdown. Sustaining them depends almost entirely on international aid.
The 2025 to 2026 Joint Response Plan, led by the Bangladesh government alongside UNHCR and nearly 100 partner organizations, called for 710.5 million dollars for 2026 alone to reach 1.6 million people, including refugees and host communities.
That figure was already 26 percent lower than the previous year’s request, a sign of how tight humanitarian budgets have become even as needs remain high.
What the Audits Actually Found
The real scrutiny came from inside the UN system itself. An internal audit by the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services examined UNHCR-managed Rohingya projects carried out between January 2023 and December 2024 and identified mismanagement, waste of funds, weak planning, and poor oversight.
Reporting on the audit noted that millions of dollars had gone toward infrastructure that ended up sitting unused, along with overlapping projects and procurement processes that lacked sufficient oversight.
UNHCR did not dispute the findings. A spokesperson for the agency said it remains committed to transparency and accountability, and that steps were already underway to act on the audit’s recommendations and tighten oversight and program implementation.
Why Tracking the Money Is So Difficult
Part of the challenge is structural. Aid moves through a layered system, from UN agencies to nearly 100 implementing partners, roughly half of them Bangladeshi organizations, each managing its own procurement and reporting. That fragmentation makes it hard for any single body, or any outside observer, to trace a dollar from donor pledge to refugee household with full confidence.
Rohingya advocates have been among the loudest voices demanding change. One Cox’s Bazar-based Rohingya journalist argued that aid organisations should not be able to blame deaths or shortfalls on funding gaps alone, calling instead for transparency, independent oversight, and measurable impact to become the foundation of the response for as long as repatriation to Myanmar remains unsafe.
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The Cost of Losing Donor Trust
The stakes go beyond bookkeeping. As commentary in Bangladeshi media has pointed out, governments only keep funding relief efforts they trust will be used responsibly, and audit findings that expose weak financial controls or ineffective project management risk eroding that confidence.
If donors pull back further, the consequences will not land on international organisations first. They will land on Rohingya refugees, in the form of cuts to food assistance, healthcare, and other essential services, at a time when host country Bangladesh is already managing its own economic pressures.
No Single Number Tells the Whole Story
No public audit has put a precise dollar figure on exactly how much Rohingya aid money has been wasted or mismanaged, and reports so far point to specific failures rather than one confirmed total.
What is clear is that a humanitarian operation moving hundreds of millions of dollars a year still lacks the kind of independent, real-time tracking that would let donors, journalists, or the refugees themselves see clearly where every dollar lands.
Summary: Bangladesh’s Rohingya refugee response runs on hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but internal UN audits have flagged mismanagement, unused infrastructure, and weak financial controls, raising real questions about where the money goes.
