The UN refugee and migration agencies said on 6 November that funding shortfalls mean they can prioritise only about one in ten of the 15.4 million people in Sudan who need emergency shelter and basic household items. Fewer than one million have been reached this year.
An estimated 15.4 million people across Sudan urgently need emergency shelter and basic household items, but humanitarian agencies can prioritise assistance for only about 10 per cent of them because of funding shortfalls, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said in a joint statement on Friday 6 November. So far 936,000 people have been helped, Al Jazeera and Reuters reported.
Speaking from Khartoum to a UN press briefing in Geneva, IOM's chief of mission in Sudan, Mohamed Refaat, said the agency's warehouses were "completely empty now". He told UN News: "Just yesterday, we had 16 trucks arriving in Darfur, but they were just the last that we had in our stocks." Refaat said the number of internally displaced people could rise again despite recent returns, and that agencies had already scaled back their ambitions to serving one person in ten.
Blue Nile a new frontline
Abubakarr Jalloh, UNHCR's deputy representative in Sudan, told the Geneva briefing that almost 15 million people had been uprooted by the war or were trying to rebuild in places that had been destroyed, including returnees and refugees who had fled to Sudan in earlier years. He said the war had spread this year to a new frontline in Blue Nile, where nearly 120,000 people had been displaced since January, many fleeing at night with nothing.
Jalloh said the collective shelter response needed $179 million this year and was only 35 per cent funded. Three in four internally displaced people are women and children, he said, and below-average rainfall linked to El Niño had hit harvests in Darfur and Kordofan, leaving food prices "painfully high" even after the harvest season. The agencies warned that without flexible funding more families would face winter without protection from harsh weather, insecurity and exploitation.
Context
About 8.6 million people remain displaced inside Sudan and more than 4.6 million have fled abroad, according to the agencies, while more than 5.2 million have returned to their areas of origin, often to destroyed homes and services. Sudan's 2026 Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan has received 47 per cent of the $2.9 billion requested, UN News said. The appeal comes as fuel shortages and drone strikes on power stations disrupt aid convoys and water supplies in several states, which UN officials described earlier this week.
Image: Displaced children at Dabba Nayra camp in the Tawila area of North Darfur, Sudan, 2025. Ahmed 222222, via Wikimedia Commons, CC0.