Maintaining commitments to age-, gender- and disability-responsive healthcare services stipulated in the 2018 Global
Compact on Refugees (UNHCR, 2018) is challenging in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district, which is home for over two million
Bangladeshi citizens in one of the poorest regions in the country and some 860,000 Rohingya refugees who fled Myanmar.
Local Bangladeshi government structures have limited resources and unclear mandates on health service provision for
the Rohingya (Sida, 2019), guided by competing political agendas including the repatriation of the Rohingya to Myanmar,
relocation to other areas of Bangladesh and the continuation of parallel humanitarian health-service provision in the camps.
The Global Compact seeks to guarantee the expansion of national health systems to refugees and to prioritise sector
expertise to enhance quality of care to host communities and refugees alike. The response from the health, food security
and nutrition sectors in Bangladesh – guided by the Civil Surgeon, the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Food
Programme (WFP), UNICEF and their partners and donors – has provided life-saving clinical and preventive care since
the mass refugee influx in 2017 (Sarker et al., 2020). However, limited capacity and political will for the district to absorb
the Rohingya into national health systems, have limited the scope for both refugee inclusion and the commitment to age-,
gender- and disability-responsive healthcare services for refugees.