Sudan’s children going hungry as famine looms – Unicef

The Sudanese Armed Forces and RSF, have divided the country roughly in two, and plunged it into a humanitarian catastrophe.

The army has restricted access for food deliveries across conflict lines into areas controlled by the RSF.

RSF fighters are accused of widely plundering resources, and have been besieging a city of nearly two million people, El Fasher, for more than a month.

Ms Russell said she couldn’t speak to whether they were using hunger as a weapon of war. But she said the crisis was “100% man made.”

“The challenge for us is not that we don’t have the food, it’s that we can’t get it to the people who need it. And that is really a crisis.”

Ms Russell said Sudan had the highest number of displaced children in the world – five million – and nearly all of its children were out of school, in danger of becoming a lost generation that could contribute to future instability.

“It’s hard to re-teach them, because that’s a lot of lost learning. But it’s also hard, in many cases, to get them back into the classroom,” she said.

“So in that sense, they can become lost… And if you lose that, what do we think the future is going to be like? It’s going to be unstable.”

She will add her voice to the chorus of demands for an end to the fighting. But a recent UN appeal for calm in El Fasher was ignored, and US efforts to restart peace talks have so far failed.

“There’s limited bandwidth” she said when asked about the lack of persistent international engagement to wrest order from the growing chaos in the strategic African country, citing the conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine and Haiti.

“That’s really the reason I’m going, to try to draw some attention to it and say, we need to focus on this right now. This is quite dire.

“And if we don’t do something, it’s hard to imagine how bad it will be.”