Crisis in Sudan: How to help

By the time fighting erupted in 2023, many Sudanese families and communities were already deeply vulnerable after decades of instability. Since then, the situation has spiraled. Today, more than 33.7 million people—over 72% of Sudan’s population—are in need of humanitarian assistance. By sheer scale, this has become the largest crisis in the history of modern humanitarian response. Behind that superlative are millions of families forced from their homes, losing everything they own, and trying to survive without consistent access to food, water, or protection.

Learn more about the crisis in Sudan.

Intensified violence in Sudan has left millions of families facing extreme hunger. At the beginning of this year, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification estimated that nearly 19 million people are facing crisis or emergency levels of hunger, struggling to find enough food to survive. For over 206,000 people facing IPC Phase 5—the highest classification, considered to be “catastrophic” levels of hunger—the situation is even more dire, with survival itself uncertain. 

Learn more about the hunger crisis in Sudan.

As of April 2026, an estimated 11.6 million people have been displaced, with over 4 million Sudanese crossing borders into neighboring countries. The majority of displaced (both internally and as refugees) are women and children.

Displacement creates a large portion of the humanitarian need in these situations. Millions of Sudanese escaped violence without much more than the clothes on their backs, and arrived in host communities with little cash and limited resources available to them.

In January, the World Health Organization warned that Sudan’s health system was on “the brink of collapse.” 

In conflict zones, more than 70% of the healthcare system has stopped functioning. Doctors, nurses, midwives, and other healthcare workers are also on the frontlines with attacks on health systems. According to the WHO, at least 173 health workers have been killed since April 2023, and more than 200 attacks on healthcare facilities have been verified—along with more than 1,800 related casualties.