Overview & Methodology
Since August 2017, an estimated 727,000 Rohingya refugees have arrived in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar District from Myanmar, bringing the total number residing in Bangladesh to approximately 921,000.1 The unplanned and spontaneous nature of the post-August Rohingya refugee camps have combined with high population densities and challenging environmental conditions to produce a crisis with especially acute water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) needs.
In April 2018, REACH undertook a WASH household assessment in the framework of the Cox’s Bazar WASH Sector with UNICEF support, which established a baseline for WASH conditions and perceptions amongst Rohingya refugee communities in Cox’s Bazar District. Between August and October 2018, REACH undertook this follow-up assessment, taking the form of a household survey covering 33 out of the 34 Inter Sector Coordination Group-recognised camps, with Kutupalong RC the only exception due to ongoing security concerns. Due to issues surrounding access, enumerators were able to access some of the camps only intermittently between 12 and 26 September 2018.
This follow-up assessment aims to understand changing WASH conditions across the Rohingya refugee camps since April 2018, and where possible understand the impact of the monsoon season, to inform priority areas and types of humanitarian programming. Results of this follow-up assessment are generalizable at the camp level with a 95% confidence level and a 10% margin of error. The method of identifying heads of households as primary respondents in the baseline survey resulted in a low proportion of female respondents. To address this limitation, this follow-up survey required enumerators to interview refugees of the same gender only. As a result, menstrual hygiene indicators are not included in camp-level factsheets, due to an insufficient number of females having been interviewed to yield generalizable results, however these indicators are included in the all-camp summary factsheet. This factsheet presents an analysis of data collected within Camp 7, where 113 households were surveyed,2 as well as an indicator comparison table displaying changes in WASH conditions between the baseline and follow-up assessments. Enumerator training took place prior to the start of data collection, including sessions on testing for residual chlorine run by the Centre for Disease Control, as well as Prevention of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (PSEA) run by UNHCR. Support for questionnaire translation from English to Rohingya language and enumerator language training was provided by Translators Without Borders.
As part of this assessment, 33 camp-level factsheets and one all-camps summary factsheet display key findings from the survey. All REACH products, including those related to the baseline assessment, are available on the REACH Resource Centre. In addition, all datasets are available on Humanitarian Data Exchange, while all factsheets and maps are available on HumanitarianResponse.