Two weeks ago I was in Cox’s Bazar, a thriving coastal city on the Bay of Bengal in Bangladesh. Named after a British trader and famed for its long sandy beach, Cox’s Bazar has always been open to the world.

However, now it faces the huge task of catering for the Rohingya community forced to migrate from Myanmar as the humanitarian crisis continues. Since 2017, the small refugee camp run by the United Nations for some 35,000 Rohingya has been transformed into a sprawling city, home to more than 908,000 victims of persecution.

Most are residing in the Kutupalong-Balukhali expansion site, which has become the largest such settlement in the world. I visited the camp at the request of the World Food Programme. Their emergency coordinator at the camp, Peter Guest, had noticed that amongst the UN and international NGO staff working in the camp one group of articulate and determined young women stood out.  They were the 30-odd graduates from the Asian University for Women, a regional university offering world class liberal arts education to young women from 17 countries across Asia and the Middle East, from Myanmar to Sri Lanka, from Vietnam to Pakistan.  I am the proud chancellor of the AUW and I jumped at the chance to witness these alumni’s work while I was in Bangladesh for the university’s 2019 graduation ceremony.

What I saw there was an evolution in the way the camp is run and a deep consideration of its impact on the local community. I was struck by the parallels with the human rights approach that leading businesses and investors are using more and more to identify and manage their environmental, social and governance (or “ESG”) risks and impacts. I spend a lot of time working with business leaders on how best to embed their values and respect of human rights within their organisations and supply chains, and in Cox’s Bazar I was delighted to find a powerful case study.

Take, for example, the WFP itself.  Its core mission is to provide food for those in the camp.  It still runs traditional General Food Assistance in some parts of the camp, providing ration packs of rice, lentils and spices to the families queuing at its food stations.

However, thanks to a more holistic view of food distribution and the embrace of technology, 460,000 refugees now receive food assistance through an e-voucher scheme. Each family has its own food card, which looks like a credit card. The monthly food allowance is loaded onto these cards, which also hold the biometric fingerprints of those registered to use the card to shop for provisions.

The most obvious benefit is that this enables the recipients to purchase a wider variety of food at convenient times and locations. They can make their own choices about what their families can eat and how they will vary their diet, which is a dignity most of us take for granted.  Yes, the rice, lentils and spices are still there, but now alongside more fresh fruit and vegetables.

Some local businesses are now being invited into the camp to offer additional foodstuffs.  They have introduced new healthy products, seasonal fruit and vegetables and even a uniform for the staff to attract more customers.

Less obviously, but critically, this approach also minimises one of the unintended consequences of the traditional, and well-intentioned, bag-and-distribute approach to food aid.  Because of its vast scale, the camp dominates the communities nearby and the distribution of free food from elsewhere undermines the market economy for local farmers.  The new e-voucher approach, now in its fifth year and expected to replace the old model entirely, presents an opportunity for the local communities to sell their produce in the camp and so benefit from injections of cash into their own economies.

But the WFP and international NGOs want to go further to ensure that the local communities do not feel disengaged, disenfranchised or dispossessed by the camp and its inhabitants.  They recognise the camp’s negative environmental impact, including the drain on scarce water resources and the strain on roads and other infrastructure.

Cash-for-work opportunities are already available to those in the camp, including initiatives to engage women in non-traditional work such as road-building and construction. The WFP now plans to expand these programmes to provide wider business and skills training, and to extend these opportunities in the host community. 

Increasingly, businesses are paying attention to their social impacts on local communities, as a commercial, legal and risk-management imperative as well as for ethical reasons.  In Cox’s Bazar, I saw a similar approach in the humanitarian sector and the positive difference this is making.  In both cases, meaningful, thoughtful and strategic engagement with the wider community is essential for building and nurturing the long-term relationships needed for sustainable operations.

There is plenty we can all learn from the experiences of these impressive AUW graduates and their colleagues, and I am already looking forward to my next visit to Bangladesh.