First published as a Letter from Scotland on Substack, March 18, 2025
The US has made a huge cut in its Overseas Aid budget and the UK has followed suit. While the UK has said that it will prioritise aid for Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan it has made no such commitment for Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, the world’s biggest refugee camp.
Magnus Wolfe Murray has been a humanitarian aid worker for most of his adult life. From 2020-23, he was a humanitarian adviser to the UK’s Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) at Cox’s Bazaar.
More recently, Magnus has founded an NGO called Movement in Refuge, to continue the work of his late partner Kasha Rigby, bringing sport and training opportunities to Cox’s Bazar and eventually to other refugee camps.
Here I asked Magnus about the situation in the camp.
Q What is Cox’s Bazar like?
Magnus: Many of the Rohingya fled Burma when a new wave of persecution was unleashed in 2017. Across rivers, through terror, they arrived in the forested hills of Cox’s Bazar district in Bangladesh’s south-eastern borderlands.
Just imagine hundreds of thousands of people arriving in a woodland where nothing was organised for human habitation.
Large swathes of what had been forest were cut down to make space for refugee camps. And people had to make fires to cook with, so more trees were cut.
When I arrived three years after this human wave, I found a huge city made up of many townships of bamboo shacks, with streets made from bricks or compressed earth, hillsides stabilised from collapse with ridges and terracing.
There are 33 camps. Each camp has around ten blocks, each block has up to 18 sub-blocks, so this gives an idea of the scale of it all. Aid organisations may just be working in one camp or block or sub block.
The water supply has to reach everyone; health clinics need to be spread out so that people don’t have to walk too far to reach them, and so on.
Although conditions are super-difficult, I think it’s the best-organised camp in the world. The major challenges like fresh water, sewage and cooking are being dealt with as well as they possibly could be.
The forest inside and around the camp is recovering – largely because the FCDO supported a really successful initiative called Safe+ to provide cooking gas to every household, and to replant trees.
It is a shame that few in the UK know about some of the amazing things that the FCDO – working in partnership with other organisations – has achieved here. (1)
Q What do the cuts in aid mean for the people of Cox’s Bazar?
Magnus: At the moment, the immediate impact is that the food ration for residents is probably going to be cut in half from next month. The food comes from the World Food Programme. The WFP don’t have any choice because they need a certain amount of money for April, and it is not showing up.
The WFP uses one of the best distribution systems I’ve ever seen in the world. It’s called Building Blocks which uses blockchain technology.
There are probably about 200,000 families registered refugees in the camp. (They call them forcibly displaced Myanmar nationals, because the government doesn’t want to call them refugees, but whatever, they come and they get a refugee ID number.) So let’s say you’re Mohammed, you’ve got your wife and three kids, and two elderly parents, so you get those seven people’s allocation as credits. It goes into the blockchain.
You then go to the supermarkets that have been put in place by the UN in each camp (sub-contracting national shopping chains, who know everything about shipping, storage, staffing shops, etc.), and you show your card, or even scan your fingerprint, and it electronically shows how many credits you have. Let’s say each person in the family is given 10 credits per month, so they can shop for 70 credits that month. And the family can choose from fresh vegetables, dry goods, pasta, rice, even fresh fish or still-live chicken. They can come a few times a month, as they need. It allows the refugees choice; in other settings they are given certain items of food and that’s that. This choice is so much more dignified. It is also much more efficient.
But from next month, if the number of credits is reduced by half, there literally will not be enough food to feed the family. And the same level of cutback is happening in the other programmes, like health care, water and sewerage management and the cooking gas programme.
Q What are these people going to do if they can’t feed their families?
Magnus: If we cut resources to these people, they will be faced with some very stark choices.
They’re not allowed to work, by rule of the Bangladesh government. They can’t go home, because the land where they came from is now controlled by a group called , the Arakan Army, a local militia that is one of many fighting against the military regime of Myanmar. Like the regime, the Arakan Army also attacks and kills Rohingya minorities.
So some of them are going to take dangerous options, start trading drugs, going on very dangerous migration options to Malaysia.
There’s a drug traded across the Myanmar border. It’s called Yaba, a methamphetamine mix, super addictive, and that’s a huge drug industry. So one risk is that more people get involved in that, just as a means to make any kind of money to survive.
In a drug economy, you’ve got all sorts of very nefarious outfits involved in that. A couple of the gangs in the camp are kidnapping and attacking people. They are known to force people to be drug mules for this Yaba; but as food aid become less available people may have to chose to join these murderous gangs to traffic drugs just to keep their families alive.
There’s also the risk of radicalisation. We should acknowledge that Islamic extremism hasn’t taken root in Bangladesh and the military has dealt harshly with anyone involved in terror attacks in the past. However if, for example, an Islamic State outfit in Africa says: ‘Look, the West has let you down. Come join us. We will pay you a couple of 100 bucks a month. Here’s a gun, some training, and you’re going to be fighting for something meaningful.’ that’s just a very hard decision to say no if you are desperate, and your family doesn’t have enough to eat.
Q What did the UK overseas aid money achieve at Cox’s Bazar?
The money that the UK was spending on aid for Cox’s Bazar was not a huge percentage of what it takes to run the camp (at between 5 – 10%) but every year, it’s come in and filled really critical gaps in service delivery, whether it’s on that LPG cooking gas, health care, water, sanitation or some last minute support to the food chain, to the food pipeline, or some critical work in shelter and site management.
A few agencies have said – we really appreciated that the UK would often be responsive to the needs as they emerged, huge gaps that appeared towards the end of the year.
I’d say over the dozen or so years I’ve worked for the FCDO, I see that all over the place. You know, the UK has had a really special role in the humanitarian side – being in the top five donors in every response and funding stuff that others don’t and having a kind of intelligent and meaningful involvement supporting where we can the right agencies at the right time. And also, not just the funding, but our voice in the policy debate, in raising critical and challenging issues, was valued.
When it comes to Cox’s Bazar, Britain has a long connection with Burma. It was part of the British Empire and some of the roots of today’s ethnic conflict date back to that time. (If you want to understand more about the background, the novel The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh describes it beautifully) So there is some kind of obligation to help deal with the aftermath of all that.
Q How do you feel about the UK’s decision to follow the US in slashing overseas aid?
Magnus: I think it is a big mistake. There was an opportunity for the British government to acknowledge what the US had done by cutting off USAID and saying, We believe that our national security and our moral commitments mean that we should increase aid. We should lean in further and show leadership in the international development sector by doing more, not reducing.
Because, as we’ve heard from a lot of defence officials, aid is actually very much part of national security. If you use your soft power in a way that improves the situation, if you reduce the risk of further conflict and migration with your overseas development money, you’re actually going to avert some of the threats that might cause problems later on. It is a bit like spending money on preventing illness rather than treating the symptoms.
I also find it hugely disappointing that Keir Starmer announced this cut shortly after Trump axed USAID. There is a “double-whammy” effect when two of the major donors in disasters cut by full or half: they know perfectly well that this will lead to famine, disease, increased conflict, death and significant new waves of migration.
Q The UK government has said it needs to redirect the money to defence. What do you think about that?
Magnus: It undermines decades of international solidarity, belief in shared values of mutual peace and security, leadership in humanitarian action. Those ideals are not separate from defence – they are really what we should be defending. Without those, what do we stand for in the world?
Q How did you start out as a humanitarian aid worker?
Magnus: There was a revolution in Romania in 1989 which exposed a child protection crisis. After the revolution everyone became aware of the orphanages and the terrible conditions of the kids. While most were reasonably managed, if somewhat Dickensian, there were about 35 institutions known as “house hospitals for irrecoverable children” which were beyond desperate. Children would die of malnutrition, cold, abuse and neglect. We came to learn that 35% of the children and young adults would die there every year, before we arrived, when we managed to reduce it to zero: no more deaths.
After the revolution, we went out with a Scottish convoy that was organised to help Romania, but it was pretty chaotic. We learned a lot, and we thought we could do better, just start our own NGO. And we did.
We set up Scottish European Aid, it was basically me and my brother Rupert in my mum’s kitchen. My mum (the publisher Stephanie Wolfe Murray) had a full-time job at Canongate Publishing, but she helped, she gave us some space to work, and she really helped with publishing and design for our comms materials.
So we focused on that for a couple of years. We didn’t have to raise a lot of money, just enough to keep the kids’ home heating and plumbing going and manage hundreds of different repairs, physiotherapy and activities for the kids.
In 1992, I went to Bosnia when the war in former Yugoslavia was going nuts, and we scaled up. My former wife Monica and dozens of other awesome people came in and helped out.
And then our son Nikita came along in the mid-90s, and so we went back to the UK, and that’s when I realised I needed to get some academic credit, otherwise you’re not recognised in the world of this sector. So I did a Master’s at York University in 1996 and then I went back into the field with different organisations, then the UN.
After about 20 years, I started working as an advisor to the UK government. And now I have reeled back to where I began and started an NGO.
Q What is the goal for Movement in Refuge?
Magnus: I am committing to this full time and I see it as a low-cost and highly effective intervention with people who are stuck in displacement for years, and the local communities that host them. I see this as a way that ordinary folks like us, who love the outdoors and the feelings we get from movement, sport, play, the excitement of matches, races and competitions, can be part of a global movement to reach people stuck in camps, caught up in conflict and really suffering.
We want to ask people who recognise these benefits to contribute whatever they can afford on a monthly basis.
We the people can afford a cup of coffee a month. That’s all it takes really, we are not asking people to give hundreds of pounds saying, you know, 10 or a month, or five per month, or whatever.
The more we do, the more we can reach. I am also hoping that some more famous people in the world of sport might be interested in supporting us by putting the stories of our work on their insta, their socials, and let others know.
Most of the young people in Cox’s Bazar just don’t have anything to do. It is a particular problem for the young women who are often confined to the shelters.
We want to hire trainers and coaches from within the camps, so we will be putting money into the camps, and providing a way for them to build confidence and make friends. It is mental health support as well as sport.
Near Cox’s Bazar is an amazing beach and some of the young women who Kasha taught to surf dream of representing Bangladesh at the Olympics and making the country proud of them. With the right training, I think they could get there.
Magnus and Yasmin at the UN in Geneva this weekend, trying to win backing for MiR. We have now recruited Yasmin Akter, a cricketer of Rohingya background, living in Yorkshire since she was 8 years old. She returns to the refugee camps in Bangladesh to help train coaches and children in different sports. She is the first Rohingya woman to excel in sports and can be a real beacon of hope and inspiration to others.
So we have a lot of exciting plans – we just need the backing to make them a reality.
Q You will be aware that these decisions to slash aid come after a lot of criticism of aid generally and whether it works in the long term. For example, Dambisa Moyo, an economist who sits in the House of Lords (see last week’s Substack), wrote a book called; ‘Dead Aid, Why Aid is Not Working’. What do you think?
I think there is a distinction between development aid and humanitarian aid. A lot of development aid goes to these huge organisations and maybe not all of it is very effective. I am not an expert in that area.
But after decades of work in the humanitarian aid sector, I would say that humanitarian aid can really work. It can make a massive difference.
I have learned how many amazing specialists in all the different fields, from mental health to shelter and water sanitation, food aid to education in emergencies that are out there.
Some are better than others, and in some countries, an agency, an organization, could be good, and in the next country, they’re pretty crap. So it is down to people. So you learn to invest in teams, good teams. You have to get that right.
Then it’s the right thing at the right time, in the right place, it saves lives big time, and brings a lot of hope and prevents things getting worse. You can prevent really bad radicalism and terrible social protection issues like commercial sex trafficking and child labour, child abuse, very high levels of paedophilia and these kind of the worst aspects of what humans can do to each other. You can prevent that by having the right humanitarians on the ground.
(1) Magnus adds: Another example of really good work that FCDO has supported in the Cox’s Bazar camps is the development of bamboo treatment facilities – more like small factories – where structural bamboo brought from the North of Bangladesh for refugee shelters, was treated with simple borax salt solutions. This effecitvely extends the life of these bamboo posts and beams for many years to come. That saves money in the future as there is less maintenance cost. We then supported UN partners to bring in one of the world’s leading natural building consultants, British straw-bale and lime building expert, Bee Rowan. Bee has shown how when local soils are stabilized with lime it makes the bamboo shelters resistant to fire, and further extends their life. This saves millions of pounds of future expenditure and obviously prevents fires from spreading. ,
Then there’s sewage treatment. Imagine asking local water authorities in a UK city to quickly create treatment systems that are ready in a few months to treat raw sewage from around 200,000 families. We would really struggle. With UK, US and other donor funding, our UN and NGO partners pulled this off in these camps. The quality of waste water coming out of these systems now is good – meeting local Government standards. I have never seen such competent civil engineering support and coordination in a humanitarian response.
I also really appreciate the management and coordination system that the Bangladeshi Government has in place. Each camp has a Bangladeshi civil servant in charge (like a mayor of a small township), while the overall response is managed by a senior civil servant who juggles multiple political, security, economic and social challenges every day. In this sense, the Government of Bangladesh has set an example the rest of the world should follow when it comes to managing refugee settlements.