SUDAN is being cut off from humanitarian aid as charities withdraw or close their services there after the freeze on funds from the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
Before President Trump’s funding cuts, half of Sudan’s population — 30.4 million people — were in need of humanitarian aid because of the continuing civil war. The US was Sudan’s biggest aid donor in 2024.
One grass-roots organisation that was funded mostly by the US is Emergency Response Rooms (ERR), which ran kitchens staffed by local people offering food and medicines to communities in parts of the country inaccessible to international aid agencies. It has now closed 1100 communal kitchens.
The American Friends of the Episcopal Church of the Sudans (AFRECS) told their supporters: “USAID had been supplying two thirds of the support for the Emergency Response Rooms created by brave and resourceful Sudanese to provide one meal per day to starving people. That support has stopped dead.”
ERR’s co-ordinator in the western Darfur region told NBC news that the charity expected people to begin dying of hunger within three weeks as a result of the enforced closures.
AFRECS said that it was still able to send direct aid through the Episcopal Church to those in dire need, and was appealing to churches to donate.
The update said: “Some of the most vulnerable people in the world are suffering and dying during the current administration’s freeze of the minuscule 1% of the U.S. government’s budget allocated to foreign aid. As citizens of the richest country in the world, we have a moral obligation to help these people. Not doing so thwarts the laws passed by Congress, in allocating these funds, and damages Americans’ image around the world as a charitable and caring people.
“I ask you now to think expansively about who your neighbors are. Love one another as I have loved you is our command.”
AFRECS urges supporters to lobby Congress for aid “appropriated by Congress [to] be immediately restored”.
Alongside the cut in humanitarian aid, the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières has scaled down its operation because increasing violence in northern Darfur. Its spokesman said that the decision to withdraw had been “heartbreaking”.
Civil war broke out in Sudan in April 2023. Thousands of civilians have been killed and injured, and there is no sign of an end to the conflict. The World Food Programme says that famine is now present in ten regions of the country.
