New Report: Global Aid Cuts Are Dismantling the Prevention and Protection Services That Keep Rohingya Women and Girls Safe

WASHINGTON —  Rohingya women and girls in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, are losing access to the services that keep them safe from violence before it happens, according to a new Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) report. As humanitarian funding has collapsed globally — deepening dramatically after the U.S. paused foreign aid in January 2025 — Women and Girls Safe Spaces (WGSS) across the Rohingya camps have been forced to abandon community outreach, awareness-raising, and other prevention work in order to preserve only the barest crisis response. 

The report finds that this narrowing of services is not simply the result of smaller budgets, but of a funding framework that formally treats prevention activities as expendable amid rising violence against women and continued structural barriers. The consequences are already measurable: reported cases of gender-based violence (GBV) are rising in the camps, even as the sector’s capacity to prevent and respond to them shrinks. The report “How Funding Cuts Are Reshaping Women and Girls Safe Spaces in Rohingya Refugee Camps” draws on interviews with organizations operating WGSS and with Rohingya women and adolescent girls themselves. 

Key findings include: 

• Ending GBV prevention work is driving up exacerbating violence. GBV service providers across the camps pointed to a new policy developed in response to funding cuts as the cause. As outreach and risk mitigation programming was cut, several organizations reported the same pattern: rising violence. One UN agency recorded a 7 percent increase in GBV cases in a single quarter and traced it directly to reduced risk mitigation work; a legal aid provider said plainly that “when funding cuts reduce the presence of protection actors, the rate of violence against women and children increases.” Organizations named the specific driver: the Joint Response Plan, the framework donors use to coordinate and prioritize aid to the Rohingya response, which now treats only crisis response as “lifesaving” — meaning even a donor’s already-committed, multi-year funding for prevention has had to be redirected toward bare-minimum services instead. 

• Staffing collapses have left survivors without the case management and referrals they depend on. Facilities that once had up to ten staff members now often have just one case worker covering multiple safe spaces, forced to rely on unpaid volunteers to keep doors open. Referral pathways for medication, contraceptives, and legal aid have weakened accordingly, leaving women arriving at referral services only to find the support they need is unavailable or substantially reduced. 

• Losing the Shantikhana itself, women and girls’ “place of peace,” is a distinct harm, separate from any single service lost. Rohingya women and girls described the WGSS as the only space where they can rest, breastfeed, wash, and speak freely without men present. Proposals to merge WGSS with mixed-gender Child Friendly Spaces risk eliminating that physical and psychological safety even where individual services continue. Women and girls with the fewest alternatives, including female heads of household, divorced women, and adolescent girls, stand to lose the most. 

“If this place of ours closes, our mouths are closed, our hands and feet are closed, everything is closed,” said Noor, a Rohingya woman interviewed for the report. “We have never gone anywhere else. We have been coming here since the beginning.” 

“For nine years, these spaces have been the one place Rohingya women and girls could go to learn to read, report abuse safely, and simply feel at peace,” said Julianne Deitch, Director of Research at Women’s Refugee Commission. “What this research shows is that restoring funding alone won’t fix this. As long as prevention is treated as optional and response as the only thing worth saving, we will keep asking survivors to wait for help until after the violence has already happened.” 

The report calls on the Rohingya Coordination Platform to fund GBV prevention and risk mitigation alongside response as a single, integrated intervention; on camp authorities to consult Rohingya women and girls before merging WGSS with mixed-gender facilities; and on donors to create flexible funding mechanisms that let Rohingya women-led organizations, currently barred from formally registering in Bangladesh, access and direct resources themselves.