Three Years On: NGOs Call for Urgent Action on the Sudan Crisis

As a member of the Inter-Agency Working Group East and Central Africa, ActionAid joins humanitarian organizations in calling for urgent, coordinated international action to address the world’s largest and most acute displacement crisis. As the conflict in Sudan hits the three-year mark, millions of people have been displaced internally and across the region as women and girls continue to experience distressing cases of sexual and gender-based violence, and more than one-third of the population is exposed to acute food insecurity. 

Regional Crisis Impact 

The displacement of nearly 4.5 million refugees and returnees across the region is overwhelming transit centres and refugee camps and sites, and heightening tensions with host communities who are already living in extremely vulnerable conditions. The refugees and returnees are facing malnutrition, injury, and trauma.

Urgent Action 

As global leaders convene in Berlin to mark the third anniversary of the conflict, NGOs are calling on donors and international partners to take decisive action. We urge donors to: 

• Develop a coherent regional approach and response to the different underfunded crises across the region, especially in the marginalised peripheral areas bordering Sudan.
• Fully finance the regional displacement crisis. 
• Increase the proportion of overall funding channelled directly on a bilateral basis to INGOs and Local Actors in hard-to-reach areas. 
• Promote and fund flexible, area-based, trans-border programming on a multi-year basis.
• Undertake collective humanitarian diplomacy to urge governments to keep their borders open for those fleeing the violence in Sudan, and towards parties to the conflict to guarantee unfettered humanitarian access for aid actors, including cross-border movements of staff and supplies. 

Read the full joint statement. 

ActionAid’s Response and Advocacy 

At the onset of the crisis, ActionAid supported vulnerable internally displaced persons (IDPS), refugees and returnees in Sudan, South Sudan and Ethiopia with targeted emergency support to survivors of gender-based violence (GBV), psychosocial support, multipurpose cash assistance to meet urgent needs including food, transport, and basic services, capacity building of community health volunteers and raising GBV awareness through local media. 

ActionAid calls on the African Union (AU), Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), East Africa  Community (EAC), Southern Africa Development Community (SADC), African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and African governments to act decisively and take immediate action to silence the guns and restore Sudanese civilian ownership of peace processes.