More than 30 million people in Sudan, over half of them children, urgently require humanitarian assistance after 20 months of devastating conflict, the United Nations reported on Monday. The UN launched a $4.2 billion appeal to aid 20.9 million of the 30.4 million people in need, describing the crisis as unprecedented.
“Sudan is gripped by a humanitarian crisis of staggering proportions,” said Edem Wosornu of the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) during a Security Council briefing. She stressed the dire need for global support, citing widespread hunger and starvation as the war between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) continues with little regard for civilian lives.
Beth Bechdol, deputy director-general of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), urged member states to act swiftly both diplomatically and financially. “Millions of lives are at further risk if we fail to respond at scale today,” she warned, highlighting the region’s growing instability.
Since the war began in April 2023, over 8 million people have been displaced within Sudan, compounding the already 2.7 million internally displaced before the conflict. An additional 3.3 million have fled to neighboring countries, pushing the total number of uprooted individuals to over a quarter of Sudan’s pre-war population.
Famine has been declared in five areas and threatens five more by May, with 8.1 million people teetering on the brink of starvation. Despite these dire conditions, the Sudanese government denies a famine exists, while humanitarian access remains obstructed by violence and bureaucratic barriers. Both the army and RSF have been accused of using starvation as a weapon of war.
Efforts to secure adequate funding for Sudan’s humanitarian crisis have fallen short, with the conflict often overshadowed by other global crises, including those in Ukraine and the Middle East.
