DHAKA, May 17, 2018 (BSS) – Rohingya camps in Cox’s Bazar saw a baby boom in the last nine months when over 16,000 new faces were added to the thousand of Myanmar nationals who fled persecution in their homeland.
According to a report released by Unicef on Wednesday, on an average 60 babies are being born in Rohingya camps every day, taking the number of new born babies to 16,000 in the nine months since August last year.
An earlier study of Save the Children projected that 48,000 babies would be born this year in already overcrowded Rohingya camps.
The latest report on the baby boom by the UNICEF, however, said that it is impossible to know the exact number of babies who have been or will be born in the Rohingya camps as only about 1 in 5 of the babies born in the camps’ medical facilities.
An estimated 693,000 Rohingyas fled across the border since the Myanmar military began carrying out reprisals to alleged insurgent attacks on state security forces, the Unicef said.
According to the UN, there were about 905,000 Rohingyas in Bangladesh as of April, some of them having fled earlier violence.
The Rohingyas are a persecuted, mostly stateless Muslim minority with a total population estimated around 1.1 million.