Saint Martin’s: We Protect the Coral. Who Protects the People
The island we visit, but rarely hear
You may be going to Saint Martin’s in December and someone may offer you a ride from the jetty. Take a moment to look at the driver. Quite often, he is a boy who should be sitting in class seven.
We tend to talk about Saint Martin’s in only two ways. It is either a holiday destination or a coral reef in danger. Both are true. But it is also home to around ten thousand people, and almost nobody asks how they are doing.
The answer is: not well. The island now stays closed to tourists for nine months of the year. For the remaining three, visitors are capped at 2,000 a day, and overnight stays are allowed only in December and January.
Fishing, the older livelihood, is shrinking. And the sea that brings tourists can just as easily cut the island off. This July, rough weather stopped boats from Teknaf for ten days. More than 150 islanders, many of whom had gone to the mainland for medical treatment, could not get home, and food assistance had to be sent for around 300 families.
In December 2025, my colleagues and I from the University of Dhaka spent time on the island trying to understand one part of this story: why its children struggle to stay in school. We spoke to students and dropouts, parents and teachers, school heads, shopkeepers and Union Parishad members. What we heard was less about education than about everything education depends on.
Twelve months of fees, two months of income
The school year on Saint Martin’s runs for twelve months. Household income does not. A local businessman put it simply: what a family earns in roughly two good months has to carry it through the rest of the year. Meanwhile the fees, the exam costs, the notebooks and the tutoring bills keep arriving every month.
One parent told us that in the off-season even a monthly fee of 1,000 taka becomes hard to find. The family has paid it many times with borrowed money. “Even though we suffer,” the parent said, “we want to educate our children.”
That sentence stayed with us, because it describes the real shape of dropout on the island. Children rarely leave school in a single moment. First the fees fall behind. Then attendance becomes irregular. The family borrows, cuts back on food and clothing, and waits for the season to return. Only when every one of those options runs out does a child’s name quietly disappear from the register.
Then comes a cruel twist. When the tourists finally arrive and money starts moving, a teenager’s time suddenly has a price. A higher-secondary teacher told us about children of class six to nine driving motorbikes and vans, carrying luggage and working in hotels. Students who sat in class all through the rainy season vanish once the season opens. On Saint Martin’s, the lean months make school unaffordable, and the busy months make it feel like a waste of time. A child can be squeezed out by both.
When there is not enough for everyone
Scarcity forces choices, and on Saint Martin’s those choices are not made equally. In a focus group, parents told us openly that when money is short, sons come first. Sons are seen as future providers. Daughters are seen as future members of another household.
One young woman told us how that logic played out in her own life. Her father could pay for only one child’s board exam. Her brother sat for it. She did not, and soon afterwards her family arranged her marriage. The girls we met also spoke of having little say in decisions about their own lives, with family pressure always close at hand.
But it would be lazy to read this as a simple story of girls losing and boys winning. Boys face their own trap. Once a boy is old enough to earn, he can be quietly reassigned from student to breadwinner, especially in the tourist season. Hardship pushes girls towards marriage and boys towards work. Both leave school.
And not every family follows the script. We met a mother who kept all four of her daughters in school by borrowing and cutting household spending. Gender norms on the island are real, but they are not destiny. Families are negotiating them every day, often at great cost to themselves.
When the next class is across the sea
Even a child who stays enrolled may not get much of an education. Union Parishad members estimated that one primary school has around 600 students and just three teachers. A secondary student told us a subject on the syllabus was simply never taught. In some schools, guardians’ fees help pay for extra teachers, which means families who can barely pay for their own child are also keeping the school running.
Then there is the sea. In most of Bangladesh, a weak local school still has neighbours; a family can look for an alternative a few kilometres away. On Saint Martin’s, continuing beyond school usually means leaving the island altogether. Former students estimated the cost at no less than 5,000 taka a month for travel, food and a place to stay. Even sitting an exam can depend on the weather.
This July, officials had to discuss using a Coast Guard vessel to carry HSC examinees across to Teknaf. For a poor family, the next step in education is not a step at all. It is a migration.
And at the end of all that effort, what is waiting? Formal jobs on the island are few. Tourism work is short and low-skilled.
Teachers remembered a time when a navy recruitment quota gave island students something to compete for, and said motivation dropped once it ended. When educated young people end up doing the same seasonal work as everyone else, it becomes very hard to convince a struggling family that another year of school is worth it.
It would be easy to call this a lack of aspiration. It is not. The girls who had left school asked us, again and again, for computer, English and skills training close to home. Parents are borrowing to keep children in class. The aspiration is there. What is missing is a credible road from the classroom to a better life.
We should also be careful about praising this as resilience. A mother who keeps her daughters in school by cutting the family’s food is showing remarkable commitment. She is also absorbing a cost that the system should be carrying. Every family that quietly copes is hiding a gap in public provision.
Saving the reef without losing the people
Let me be clear: the coral needs protecting. Years of unregulated tourism, plastic and construction have done serious damage, and limits on visitors were overdue. This is not an argument against conservation.
It is an argument against conservation that forgets people live there. The restrictions shrank the island’s earning season to a few weeks, yet no matching support arrived for the families whose income disappeared.
The cost of protecting a national treasure has been handed to some of the poorest households in the country, and they are paying it partly through their children’s schooling.
What strikes me most is how rarely islanders are part of these decisions. The rules that shape their year are made far from the island, with little room for islanders’ own voices. A school head told us that organisations wanting to work on the island must collect permission from several different authorities, and many simply give up. The result is an island that is heavily regulated but thinly served.
What needs to change
None of this requires grand new schemes. It requires taking the island’s realities seriously.
1. Match support to the calendar. If tourism closes for nine months, families need help during those nine months. Off-season cash support, and school stipends paid in the lean months rather than at random times, would protect more children than larger sums arriving at the wrong moment.
2. Staff the schools properly. A hardship allowance and housing for teachers posted to the island would fill vacant posts. Poor parents should not be paying teachers’ salaries.
3. Build a bridge across the sea. Reserved hostel seats and a monthly allowance at colleges in Teknaf and Cox’s Bazar, with priority for girls, would turn the leap after SSC into a manageable step.
4. Keep children out of seasonal work. Hotels, restaurants and transport operators should not be allowed to employ school-age children during school hours, and that should be a condition of their licences.
5. Give islanders a voice. Union Parishad members, women, teachers and fishers should sit on the committee that sets tourism rules, and a share of tourism revenue should flow back into the island’s schools, health care and off-season support.
The rest of us have a part to play too. If you visit Saint Martin’s this season and a boy offers you a ride, choose an adult driver instead. Buy from island families. Respect the rules that protect the reef, and remember that you are a guest in someone’s home.
We have spent years asking how to save Saint Martin’s coral. It is time we asked the harder question. An island is not saved if its children are lost to it. Protecting Saint Martin’s must mean protecting the people who live there, and the futures they are still fighting for.
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About the author: Ahsan Ullah is a sociology researcher and a post-graduate of the Department of Sociology, University of Dhaka. This article draws on a field study conducted on Saint Martin’s Island with Most Tabassum Tamanna Mim and Mahmudul Hasan Noman of the University of Dhaka. He can be reached at [email protected]