The people who stayed

In autumn 2017, before any agency arrived, the people of Ukhiya and Teknaf opened their homes. Ordinary Bangladeshis fed and sheltered hundreds of thousands of frightened strangers because they could not turn away. The first response to the Rohingya crisis was entirely local.

Then the international system came. UN agencies and INGOs partnered with Bangladeshi organisations and built one of the world's largest aid operations — a scale no local effort alone could have reached. But as the response expanded, the money, decisions and leadership settled with the UN and foreign agencies. Bit by bit, the centre of gravity moved away from the communities that had opened their doors first.

From the beginning, this was never only a refugee crisis. It fell just as hard on the host population — in one of Bangladesh's poorest districts — where forests were cut down, the water table dropped, and roads, clinics and jobs came under strain from the arrival of a million newcomers. 

Yet the aid system is built primarily to count and serve refugees. The suffering of host communities was treated as secondary, not out of malice, but because the system is designed to see only one side of the ledger.

Caring for both sides — refugees and hosts — is a larger task than an aid response alone was built for. Even the tools meant to help host communities prove the point. The Global Compact on Refugees and the World Bank's financing for host communities are development instruments that run through the government. That is the logic: the host's side is fundamentally a public responsibility, and the consequences of failure fall on Bangladesh itself.

A sovereign state cannot sit outside a response whose fallout it will carry. Humanitarian actors must remain independent — but independence does not mean excluding the state from decisions that affect national systems. The point is to bring authority closer to the crisis while keeping humanitarian judgement impartial. Bangladesh must lead the part that no aid agency can reach, because the job is bigger than aid and the stakes are national.

For a while, none of this hurt because the money was there. Then, as in many crises, funding began to fall. At the same time, one word returned to the table: localisation. In plain terms, it means shifting money, authority and decision-making closer to the crisis — to national organisations and community actors.

Donors raised it as budgets tightened. The UN raised it as well, citing the 2016 Grand Bargain, in which donors and agencies committed to sending more aid directly to local groups. The promise was real; progress was slow. What was new was the urgency — and it arrived alongside the funding collapse.

In Dhaka, the timing looked ominous. When shrinking budgets and "localisation" arrive together, it is easy to hear them as one message: hand the work to Bangladeshis, then quietly stop paying. That fear is not foolish. A fake version of localisation does exist — one in which local groups take on the risk and paperwork while the power and money stay at the top.

Officials who want a stronger local role distrust the very word used to describe it. They are right to fear the fake. They are wrong to think it is the only kind.

Two things happening at once do not make them the same. The fear that localisation is a cover for budget cuts is understandable — but the real problem is not localising too much; it is localising too little. The money is shrinking for global reasons. And the real waste is not in handing work to Bangladeshi organisations; it is in the layers each dollar crosses before it reaches a single refugee.

This year, Bangladesh received one of the largest allocations from the UN's pooled funds. Yet, according to UN records, none of it reached a Bangladeshi organisation directly. That failed the UN's own target as much as Bangladesh's. The problem is the plumbing, not the promise — and fixing that plumbing is what real localisation actually means.

Local organisations are the ones who stay when foreign attention fades. The government is the institution that remains when every agency leaves.

Real localisation is not about dumping the bill. It is about who decides and how close to the crisis those decisions are made. It means giving each part of the response – government, national organisations, international agencies and the UN — the role it is best placed to perform.

By that test, the UN keeps the work it does best: managing pooled funds, protecting people and serving as a neutral actor with no stake in local rivalries. No one is pushed out. Jobs go to the capable, not the habitual.

None of this requires blind trust. Authority can move step by step, on a clear timeline, with oversight matched to each grant's size and risk. One test should sit above the rest: not whether donors were satisfied, but whether refugees and hosts were actually helped.

We have seen what happens when the plumbing is fixed. When a Bangladeshi organisation delivered directly — with a larger agency handling the paperwork instead of adding its own cut — the same clean water and toilets reached people at roughly 40% lower cost. Not because local groups are cheap, but because a useless layer was removed.

That is how a funding shortage can be kept from becoming a human disaster.

Let me be honest about my own place. My organisation is one of the larger Bangladeshi groups that would handle such money, so I am not a neutral voice. But this is not a plea for the big players, mine included. It is about who sets the terms of the response, not who stands first in line.

And the interest is shared. Localisation was always the UN's own goal, not something forced on it. If services collapse as funding falls, the world will blame the UN first – because these are the people it pledged to protect — and Bangladesh soon after, because it hosts them.

A response that cannot survive on less money helps no one. Local organisations are the ones who stay when foreign attention fades. The government is the institution that remains when every agency leaves. Backing them is not charity to Bangladesh. It is how everyone who will answer for this crisis protects the people at its heart.

The kindness of 2017 was Bangladeshi. Whatever we call what comes next, the lead should be Bangladeshi too — because the people who opened their doors then are the ones still here when everyone else has gone.

Sketch: TBS

K A M Morshed is the Senior Director of Advocacy, Communications and Engagement at BRAC.