From coverage to prioritisation: how funding cuts are reshaping operational decisions in Cox’s Bazar

In Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, funding cuts are no longer only a planning concern. They are changing everyday operational decisions: how much food assistance can be sustained, which health facilities remain fully functional, which shelter improvements are delayed, how many staff members can be retained, and how much community follow-up is realistic when teams are smaller.

The Rohingya response remains one of the largest refugee operations in the world. More than one million Rohingya refugees live in Bangladesh, most of them in Cox’s Bazar, where restrictions on movement and limited access to formal livelihoods leave families heavily dependent on humanitarian assistance. The 2025−26 Joint Response Plan (JRP) required $934.5 million in 2025 to reach 1.48 million people, including Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar and Bhasan Char, and affected Bangladeshi host communities. The same plan brought together 113 partners, about half of them national organisations from Bangladesh.

By the end of 2025, however, the response was still less than half funded. The official JRP funding update recorded $434.5 million received, or 46% funded by the end of the year. For implementing organisations, that gap is a staffing problem, a service-quality problem, a risk-management problem and, ultimately, a protection problem.

When budgets fall, the effects do not move neatly through one sector. A delayed shelter repair can increase fire or monsoon risk. A health facility operating at reduced capacity pushes patients elsewhere. A smaller outreach team means rumours, complaints and exclusion risks are detected later. Reduced staffing and remuneration packages pass the funding gap onto the people expected to keep services running.

From broad coverage to managed scarcity

The Cox’s Bazar response is being pushed from a broad coverage model toward a prioritised minimum-service model. The Flash Appeal and Urgent Priorities exercise made this shift explicit: $455.6 million was identified for first-priority activities as part of an essential minimum package, and approximately 49% of the original JRP appeal was required for critical, life-saving interventions.

This kind of prioritisation is necessary under funding pressure, but it is not neutral. Once life-saving activities are protected, other functions become easier to cut: prevention, community engagement, case follow-up, staff supervision, training, maintenance and feedback systems. In a protracted camp setting, these functions may look secondary on paper, but they are often what keep services safe, trusted and usable.

The key operational question is therefore not simply what gets cut. It is whether the response can make trade-offs visible, explain them to communities, monitor their consequences and adjust before small reductions become major protection risks.

Food assistance: targeting requires trust

Food assistance shows how funding pressure changes programme design and community relations. In April 2026, the World Food Programme began its needs-based targeting for food aid in the Rohingya camps, affecting 1.2 million refugees. Under this approach, households receive different transfer values according to assessed levels of food insecurity.

This kind of universal assistance is easier to explain and easier for communities to understand. Needs-based assistance can protect the most vulnerable households when resources are constrained, but it creates new operational risks: targeting errors, dissatisfaction among households receiving lower support, pressure on complaints systems and rumours about selection criteria.

Better data is required for risk mitigation. But what’s also needed is clear community sensitisation, accessible appeals mechanisms, regular monitoring of exclusion risks, and frontline staff who have enough time and confidence to explain decisions. If communication is weak, technically sound prioritisation can still damage trust.

Health services: keeping access while reducing footprints

Health services show another version of the same problem. The World Health Organization (WHO) February 2025 situation report noted that essential healthcare services at 11 primary health care facilities had been disrupted, affecting over 300,000 people. The report also highlighted risks to medicine supply, sexual and reproductive health kits, rehabilitation, nursing, mental health and psychosocial support, and disability-related services.

The important operational issue is not only that services were disrupted. It is how partners tried to manage the disruption. WHO reported that health partners were ‘mapping affected facilities, improving partner communication, prioritising essential services, […] revisiting referral pathways, and discussing relocation or merging of health facilities to optimise resources’.

These are rational decisions under pressure, but each has consequences. Merging facilities may reduce overheads, but it can increase travel time and waiting time for patients. Revising referral pathways may improve efficiency, but only if communities and frontline workers understand the changes. Prioritising essential medicines may protect urgent treatment, but it can delay care for chronic or specialised conditions. In this context, coordination is about controlling risk.

The hidden cut: fewer staff, lower remuneration and heavier workloads

At organisational level, one of the clearest impacts of funding cuts is the gradual reduction of staff numbers and remuneration packages. This has been visible in my own organisation. Posts are reduced or not replaced, contract terms become less secure, and remaining staff are expected to carry more responsibilities. The immediate financial saving is clear. The operational cost is less visible but serious.

When teams shrink, the remaining staff cover more blocks, more households or more activities. A case worker may carry a larger caseload. A supervisor may visit sites less frequently. A technical officer may be shared across several projects. A community outreach worker may have less time to follow up on complaints, rumours or referrals. None of these changes may look like a formal service closure, but together they reduce quality and responsiveness.

Lower remuneration and uncertainty about contract renewal also affect motivation. Staff may remain committed to the Rohingya response, but commitment cannot absorb chronic overload forever. When motivation falls, organisations risk higher turnover, lower productivity, weaker documentation and loss of institutional memory. In Cox’s Bazar, where relationships, camp knowledge and contextual judgement matter, losing experienced staff weakens programme continuity.

The mitigation cannot be to ask staff to do more with less indefinitely. Organisations need to redesign workloads honestly. That means protecting critical functions, simplifying reporting requirements where possible, maintaining minimum supervision standards, cross-training staff for essential back-up roles, monitoring caseload ratios and treating burnout as an operational risk. If remuneration reductions are unavoidable, managers should communicate transparently and avoid unrealistic performance expectations. A leaner response can still be professional; a response that silently transfers the funding gap onto staff will eventually pay for it through lower quality and trust.

Shelter, WASH and disaster risk: prevention deferred becomes emergency response

Funding cuts also affect prevention. This is particularly dangerous in Cox’s Bazar, where congestion, fragile shelters and exposure to hazards mean that small shocks can escalate quickly. The Camp 16 fire in January 2026 destroyed 335 shelters, affected more than 2,000 people and damaged crucial structures like latrines, bathing cubicles, water points, solar streetlights, learning centres and religious facilities.

Funding cuts do not cause every hazard, but they reduce the system’s ability to reduce risk before hazards become emergencies. Major humanitarian funding cuts halted plans to reconstruct 50,000 semi-permanent shelters across the camps. When safer shelter, water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) maintenance and disaster-risk-reduction activities are delayed, the response may save money in the short term but spend more later on emergency distributions, repairs, protection follow-up and replacement of lost household items and documents.

The operational lesson is simple: prevention is cheaper than repeated emergency recovery. But prevention is often the first area squeezed because its benefits are less visible than food distributions or emergency healthcare. Cox’s Bazar shows why that logic is risky.

New arrivals add pressure to a reduced system

The funding squeeze is happening while needs continue to rise. The Flash Appeal for new arrivals identified $84 million as urgently required to meet the life-saving and critical needs of an estimated 150,000 additional new refugee arrivals, all within the existing camps.

This creates a double pressure. Agencies are asked to maintain minimum services for current refugees while absorbing new caseloads without equivalent new infrastructure or staffing. In practical terms, the same service points, referral systems, outreach teams and community structures are expected to stretch further. Without careful prioritisation, the pressure will be felt by both existing and newly arrived households.

Localisation as mitigation, not substitution

Localisation still matters, but it should not be presented as a slogan or as a cheaper replacement for adequate funding. Its practical value lies in helping the response manage specific operational problems: identifying changing needs, maintaining access, explaining service changes, detecting rumours, supporting feedback channels and sustaining relationships when international footprints shrink.

The 2025−26 JRP shows that national organisations are already central to the response, with about half of the 113 partners being Bangladeshi national organisations. Refugee volunteers and community structures are also essential to outreach, referral and communication. But this must not become risk dumping. Local actors and refugee volunteers cannot be expected to absorb more community pressure, more operational responsibility and more reputational risk without resources, decision-making space and duty-of-care support.

If localisation is used only to deliver reduced budgets more cheaply, it will fail. If it is used to improve decision-making, accountability, access and continuity, it can help the response manage funding cuts more safely.

What should be protected

The Cox’s Bazar response cannot avoid prioritisation under current funding conditions. But prioritisation can be managed better.

First, organisations should make prioritisation criteria explicit. Communities may not agree with every decision, but unexplained reductions create rumours and mistrust. Clear communication is part of programme quality.

Second, staffing decisions should be treated as programme decisions, not only human resource decisions. Reducing staff numbers and remuneration packages affects coverage, supervision, accountability and risk management. Savings should be assessed against these operational consequences.

Third, partners should protect core field functions: community engagement, complaint handling, referral follow-up, protection monitoring and supervision. These functions are often stretched first, but they are essential for safe programming.

Fourth, service rationalisation should be accompanied by access monitoring. If health facilities merge, outreach teams shrink or support values change, partners need to track who is excluded, who stops using services and where risks are accumulating.

Finally, local and national organisations should be involved before cuts are finalised, not only asked to implement reduced plans afterwards. Their knowledge is most valuable when trade-offs are being designed.

Conclusion

Funding cuts in Cox’s Bazar are reshaping the Rohingya response from the inside. They are changing food assistance models, health service maps, shelter preparedness, staffing structures and community engagement systems. The result is a transformed operating model.

The central challenge is to make prioritisation deliberate, transparent and accountable. If cuts are merely ‘absorbed’, the response will weaken in ways that are difficult to see at first: overburdened staff, reduced motivation, slower follow-up, weaker supervision, deferred prevention and declining trust. Localisation can help manage some of these pressures, but only when responsibility is matched with resources, authority and support.

Cox’s Bazar shows that when funding falls, the hardest task is not only deciding what to cut, but protecting the systems, staff and relationships that allow essential services to keep functioning safely.

Abdul Mannan is Deputy Director – Programs at the Society for Health Extension and Development (SHED), with around 20 years of experience in community development, emergency response, safeguarding, accountability, partnership management, and programme implementation. Based in Cox’s Bazar, he supports the Rohingya humanitarian response and host communities, with a focus on localisation, community engagement, humanitarian coordination and negotiation, and strengthening local actors in crisis response.