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“In Sudan, we have the problem of the dead body,” says Aida Elsayed. The secretary general of the Sudanese Red Crescent Society (SRCS) is relaying how her volunteers entered an area in Khartoum and found bodies of people who had been thrown into water wells – a grim reminder of the war that has gripped the country.
The “mass grave” where bodies had been disposed of, and some had been left to die, had rendered the local water source undrinkable.
Elsayed can’t understand why the whole world isn’t paying attention.
She is in the UK urging MPs and government officials to remember her home country, as they finalise the foreign aid allocations for this year.
Since war broke out in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the country has spiralled into one of the world’s most acute humanitarian emergencies. More 25 million people face severe hunger and 12 million have been forced from their homes.
The Sudanese Red Crescent – the local branch of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies of which the British Red Cross is also part – remains one of the only humanitarian organisations on the ground.
“Sudan, it is a forgotten crisis,” she says, “Nobody mentions it, nobody talks about it.”
Also, as global aid has been shrinking, Sudan has been hit by shortages of essential supplies.
Having cut the UK’s overall aid budget by 40 per cent, the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) is set to publish more details about where the remaining funds will be allocated later this month. The government already announced a £120m package of humanitarian aid for Sudan this year and has named the country as one of its funding priorities.
‘The cost is very high’
The SRCS says it has only raised 30 per cent of what it needs for the year ahead.
The most urgent needs to be paid for are food and basic medicine.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) and World Food Programme, which provide many of these essentials, are both facing significant pressure on their budgets after the withdrawal of the US from global aid.
The WHO says more than half of health programmes in Sudan are at risk, covering roughly 355 health facilities.
Meanwhile, the World Food Programme is facing a shortfall of £625 million across the next six months, and is facing having to reduce the numbers of people helped or the amount of food given.
When they can’t get physical supplies, the SRCS distributes cash, “but then the prices are very high,” Elsayed says – as much as three US dollars for a piece of bread.
While 80 per cent of health facilities have been ground to dust, people’s health needs are rising – both from the toll of violence and the costs of displacement.
Outbreaks of disease from dirty water, like cholera, are becoming more common. And diseases which used to be confined to certain regions are spilling out across the whole country along with the movement of displaced people. Before the crisis, Elsayed explains, dengue spread by mosquitoes was found mostly in the east of the country. “With the movement of the population, now it is all over Sudan”, she says.
“To control that, you have to settle the population, and you cannot do that because they want to go to a better area for their children, for their family, at least to find a safe area”.
Asked about the difficult choices that inevitably have to be made when supplies and funds are so low, she shakes her head with a gentle laugh. “We don’t make choices. Whatever comes to the country, we use it and we distribute it.”
Sometimes aid comes into the country from a donor, but they can’t provide the funds to transport it, meaning desperately needed supplies are stuck in Port Sudan.
“The cost is really very high and whenever it is a dangerous area, the costs go [even higher]”.
Getting a truck from the border to Kordofan in the very centre of the country took a month earlier this year. Once on the move, there’s no guarantee that aid will reach the intended people. Human Rights Watch has found the SAF regularly blocks aid from entering RSF-controlled areas, while the RSF has raided trucks carrying food and medical supplies.
The SRCS has lost 73 vehicles carrying supplies for 7,000 people to looting.
There are 637,000 people in Sudan facing catastrophic levels of hunger, according to the World Food Programme – more than anywhere else in the world.
‘People can’t farm to produce food’
This reality is all the crueller for the fact that the country is a fertile agricultural hotspot once known as the “breadbasket of Africa”. Farms are lying untended – unsafe to access, abandoned as people flee, or used instead to house internally displaced people.
“This caused the shortage of food within the country,” Elsayed says.
“People are not able to access their land, they also don’t have access to the seeds, and even [then] they don’t feel safe to go and produce,” she says. “So that’s why now so many people rely on external funding.”
Even when it comes to the food that is still being produced inside Sudan, the conflict means “it’s not possible to be transported to where people need it,” she says.
For aid workers from the SRCS, gathered in a small office room in London and preparing to meet with UK government officials, this is personal. They are themselves displaced and have lost family and homes to the fighting.
Elsayed says, “If I start to really think about myself, my family, I cannot do the job.”
She has left the only home she had ever known, where she was born, married and had her own children, to rubble. “I cannot even enter it now”.
Instead, the group of humanitarian workers and volunteers have become each others’ homes.
“We live in one house all together. We are family to each other,” Elsayed says.
“Everyone of them has a terrible story: how he moved, who he lost in this. But at the end, they came [to help] the people in Sudan”.
One day, Elsayed came to work to see a volunteer she didn’t recognise. “I know them by heart,” she adds. The woman was offering to make tea and coffee and serve in any small way she could. Another team member later told Elsayed that the woman was a doctor – but that she wouldn’t talk about this past. She wanted to work as a “normal” volunteer and not perform any medical tasks.
It came out that the woman had been raped several times and had been brought to the hospital in a state of complete collapse. Sexual violence as a weapon of war is epidemic in Sudan, according to the UN.
For five months, the woman was cared for in hospital with the support of the SRCS, and when she was discharged she joined as a volunteer.
The volunteer, through helping the Red Crescent, gradually began to perform small first aid tasks before going back to work in the hospital as a doctor.
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It was a rare bright spot, “one of the few little things” that felt like luck to Elsayed.
And while psychological needs are mammoth and may often come at the back of the queue behind food and medicine, they are also relatively inexpensive for the SRCS to provide.
In the child-friendly spaces they set up, children who arrive will draw pictures: “It is all drops of blood. It is all dead people in the street. This is what they are drawing. And that’s what they’ve seen.”
But after some time, the children start drawing their houses.
“‘When we go, this is my house, my mother will be here. I don’t know where my father is, but he will come.’”
For the aid workers supporting them, though, thoughts of returning home and rebuilding are, for now, far from mind. Most funds offered by the UK and other donor countries are likely go towards emergency, life-saving support.
“Right now it is for Sudan, it is food and medicine,” Elsayed says. “Rehabilitation will come after that.”
This piece has been produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid series
