An investigation by Al-Taghyeer reveals a multitude of factors that have prevented humanitarian aid from reaching millions of people facing famine in Sudan
Ten-year-old Khadija sits in a displacement camp in Sudan’s Central Darfur region eating handfuls of red sorghum after days of hunger. Her suffering seems impossible to reconcile with the scale of the international relief effort directed at Sudan. Since the civil war began in April 2023, governments around the world have pledged billions of dollars in humanitarian assistance (though still far short of the amount needed). Aid agencies have delivered hundreds of thousands of tonnes of food and medicine. So why are parts of the country still facing famine?
An investigation from Sudanese newspaper Al-Taghyeer traces aid through warehouses, checkpoints, and distribution networks to show how assistance is repeatedly delayed, diverted, or lost before it reaches those most in need.
The investigation begins with the numbers. Sudan received just 43% of the required US$4.16 billion assessed as needed for humanitarian response in 2025. Even so, the World Food Program (WFP) delivered more than 324,000 metric tonnes of food, reached over 12 million people, and distributed more than US$153 million in cash assistance. The investigation argues that these figures make Sudan’s famine not so much a story of absent aid, but of aid that failed to reach those most in need.
Drawing on humanitarian reports, official investigations, and eyewitness accounts, Al-Taghyeer documents obstacles throughout the supply chain. It cites Reuters reporting on an internal WFP investigation into alleged fraud involving senior officials, including fuel that went missing and a failure to disclose to donors that authorities linked to the Sudanese Armed Forces had delayed permits for 15 aid trucks carrying life-saving assistance to the city of Nyala, in Sudan’s South Darfur region, for seven weeks.
The investigation also documents repeated attacks on humanitarian operations. It describes warehouses looted, medical supplies confiscated, and humanitarian facilities raided by armed actors from both sides of the conflict. It cites Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) accounts of medicines being seized, warehouses repeatedly looted, and aid diverted before reaching hospitals.
Beyond outright theft, the report argues that humanitarian aid has become embedded in Sudan’s wartime economy. According to aid workers interviewed, authorities aligned with both the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces have imposed permits, checkpoint fees, administrative controls and registration requirements that delay relief operations while generating revenue. Some aid eventually reappears for sale in local markets, turning food intended for displaced communities into a commodity.
The investigation contrasts these obstacles with the work of Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms, volunteer-led community networks that have continued operating in areas where many international organisations were absent. Despite working with far fewer resources, volunteers argue they have been able to reach communities that larger agencies could not access, prompting broader questions about how humanitarian funding is distributed and who is best placed to deliver it during conflict.
Ultimately, the investigation concludes that no single failure explains Sudan’s humanitarian catastrophe. Instead, famine has emerged through the cumulative effects of funding shortfalls, bureaucratic restrictions, looting, competing authorities, and a wartime economy that increasingly treated humanitarian aid itself as a resource to control, tax, or profit from. Khadija’s hunger, it argues, is the final link in that chain.
Summarised by contributing editor Cendrella Azar
| Cendrella Azar: This investigation is particularly valuable because it shifts the focus from the familiar question of whether enough aid has reached Sudan to a more revealing one: what happens after it arrives? Rather than framing the humanitarian crisis solely as a consequence of insufficient funding, the investigation reconstructs the entire aid chain to show how assistance is gradually eroded at every stage. Its central argument is that no single point of failure explains Sudan’s famine. Instead, it emerges from the interaction of funding shortfalls, bureaucracy, looting, competing authorities and the incentives of a wartime economy, where humanitarian assistance itself becomes a resource to be taxed, diverted or exploited. By weaving together official data, investigations by humanitarian organizations, international reporting, and local testimonies, the piece offers a rare systems-level explanation for why one of the world’s largest relief operations has failed to prevent mass hunger. It also raises broader questions beyond Sudan: whether humanitarian systems designed for peacetime can function when every checkpoint, permit, and supply route becomes part of a conflict economy. |
Original ‘من المانحين إلى السوق السوداء.. أين ذهبت إغاثة السودانيين؟‘ first published in Arabic by Al-Taghyeer on August 19, 2026
Al-Taghyeer is an online Sudanese newspaper founded in 2013. It currently publishes from Kampala, Uganda, where its exile journalists and staff are based, while continuing to cover news related to Sudan.
