More than 30 million people, most of them children, are in need of aid in Sudan after 20 months of devastating war in the East African country, the United Nations announced today.
The UN has launched an appeal for $4.2 billion (around €4 billion) targeting 20.9 million people across Sudan, out of a total population of 30.4 million who are in need of aid due to "an unprecedented humanitarian crisis", according to the UN.
The war, which broke out in April 2023 between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), has plunged the country into famine.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed and more than eight million have been internally displaced, adding to the 2.7 million displaced before the war to create the world's largest internal displacement crisis.
A further 3.3 million people have fled the country, meaning that more than a quarter of Sudan’s pre-war population of around 50 million is now uprooted.
Famine has already been declared in five regions of Sudan and is expected to spread to another five by May.
The Sudanese government, aligned with the army, has denied that there is a famine, but aid agencies complain that access is blocked by bureaucratic obstacles, fighting and violence.
The army and the RSF have been accused of using famine as a weapon of war. For much of the conflict, the UN struggled to raise a quarter of the funds needed.
The conflict in Sudan has often been described as the “forgotten war”, overshadowed by conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, despite the scale of the horrors inflicted on civilians.
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