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Summary
The current conflict in Sudan, with its rapid escalation and large-scale violence, stands out among recent crises for the severity of its humanitarian impact. Despite being overshadowed on the international stage by the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, Sudan is the scene of the world’s fastest growing displacement crisis, mass atrocities, and dire humanitarian needs.
The longstanding humanitarian presence in the country was completely disrupted by the sudden escalation of violence in April 2023, with national aid workers displaced, offices and facilities looted, and international staff evacuated. The coordinated aid response has since struggled to scale up sufficiently due to ongoing insecurity, logistical obstacles, political interference, and stringent constraints imposed by parties to the conflict, including denial of visas for staff and restrictions on transporting aid supplies.
Humanitarians’ efforts to push back against the constraints have so far failed to gain traction, in part because of insufficient staff in coordination roles and their absence at state levels. Faced with these obstacles, compounded by insufficient funding and lack of political pressure on the warring parties to respect international humanitarian law to facilitate access, the humanitarian response has reached only a small fraction of people in need.
A highly localised, volunteer-driven response has emerged in the form of emergency response rooms (ERRs) and other community initiatives. These voluntary, grassroots efforts are overstretched, increasingly exhausted, and lack resources. While they cannot substitute for the large-scale and sustained levels of assistance that are needed, they are playing a vital complementary role in supporting people to meet basic needs, access services, and seek safety – and they need support to continue.
The mobile phone survey of affected people in Sudan undertaken for this study (838 people across all 18 states) found that:
• aid has only reached 16% of people who need it
• most of that aid has been in the form of food – very few respondents reported having received medical or other types of assistance, and more than half said the aid they received did not meet their priority needs
• UN agencies and the Sudanese Red Crescent are the predominant aid providers – international NGOs have been notably less present, according to survey respondents, who reported them as the aid source in only 12% of cases (exceptions were Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), Plan International, and Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC))
• people in Khartoum, South Kordofan and West and Central Darfur were most likely to report that aid was not getting to the places where it is needed most.
• rather than seeing a surge of assistance, a plurality of people reported that, since the current crisis began in April, the aid presence in their area had “reduced a lot”.
Changing the grim trajectory in Sudan will require directing more resources and international attention to the magnitude of the crisis. More than this, however, donor and neighbouring governments will need to make concerted efforts to pressure the warring parties to facilitate humanitarian access, as required under international humanitarian law.
For their part, aid agencies must be willing to depart from current approaches and seek new partners, modalities, and entry points to the country in order to expand the reach of assistance.
The conflict in Sudan, fought primarily between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), escalated suddenly in April 2023 and has created a profound humanitarian crisis with exceptional levels of violence, displacement, and suffering. Fighting has raged in urban centres, including the capital Khartoum, and has been characterised by targeting of civilians, widespread sexual violence, looting, and destruction of property. At eight months in, the violence is showing no signs of abating and new fighting in November and December in Darfur and Gezira has led to further displacement (with some already displaced people forced to flee for the second or third time), and mass killings of civilians.
The most recent estimates are that 6.3 million people have fled their homes, taking refuge inside and outside the country.3 At least 24.7 million people, roughly half the population, are in need of humanitarian assistance in a country that was already facing high levels of acute food insecurity.
Since the violence began, more than 10,400 people have died.
People’s ability to access services is highly constrained in areas currently facing the most active conflict, notably Khartoum, Darfur, and Kordofan states. It is estimated that 70%– 80% of hospitals in conflict-affected states are non-functional and unable to address new disease outbreaks as they face violence, shortages of medical supplies, and a lack of cash to meet operational costs and salaries.