The bigger picture

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The Rohingya crisis is one of the world’s fastest-growing refugee emergencies, with hundreds of thousands of people having fled from Myanmar to Bangladesh over the past two years to escape extreme violence. Most of the refugees have settled in the Cox’s Bazar district of Bangladesh, living in very congested conditions, and increasing the pressure on existing infrastructure and facilities in an area that is also under threat from extreme weather conditions.

In February 2018, the World Bank asked Ipsos’s risk analytics team, based in Washington, DC, to carry out an assessment of Cox’s Bazar to locate the refugee population and help identify their needs. At the time, the population of Rohingya refugees in the area was around 650, 000.

Taking place over a three-week period, the assessment project required data to be integrated from multiple origins, including drone imagery and a ground survey. “The question the Bangladesh government and other organisations, such as the World Bank, were trying to figure out was ...