Fleeing Khartoum 
With eight other families, Mohammed arranged a bus to escape Khartoum. The journey through the city itself, a mere 30 kilometers, which should have taken just a few hours, lasted over 12. At every checkpoint, armed men harassed passengers. Two teenage boys were pulled from the bus. “Their mother cried. Their uncle went with them. We had to drive on. The boys were never seen again,” Mohammed says, his voice still heavy with the memory.
Eventually, the bus reached the northern city of Halfa, on the border with Egypt. But while women and elderly relatives could cross, Mohammed and his brother were denied entry for lacking visas. “I slept on plastic sheeting for two days, until my family made it across. It took me weeks to get a visa. My brother never got one—he returned via Port Sudan and fled to Ethiopia.”
In Egypt, Mohammed reunited with colleagues. “We met – first in Alexandria, later in Cairo – and decided we had to do something.” Displaced but undeterred, they organised weekly calls and planned a remote response. Soon after, Mohammed returned to Sudan—this time to Kassala, where Plan International had reopened a field office. From there, they coordinated the Protracted Crisis Joint Response of the Dutch Relief Alliance.

Flexible funding 
But operating in Sudan has become almost impossible. “We have blackouts, shifting frontlines, and millions on the move. You start supporting one area, then it becomes unsafe overnight.” In North Darfur, for example, Plan International was distributing food, until violence escalated. “We had to switch to cash—but there were no banks or providers.” In such a volatile situation you need a funder that allows maximum flexibility. “Thankfully, the Dutch Relief Alliance and Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs understand this. They know that if acute needs change overnight, you cannot write a report, go through a bureaucracy and have it approved weeks or months later. If somebody drowns, you don’t call the emergency number, you just jump in.”

In camps like New Halfa, Mohammed has witnessed the despair firsthand. “People screamed at me. They hadn’t eaten for a week. Children were crying. I saw an obviously traumatized person chained to the ground, for lack of medicine to calm him down.” Frustration is growing. “We ask what people need, but there’s no follow-up. They’ve had enough of assessments with no follow-up.” With the withdrawal of USAID, one of the biggest providers of food-aid in Sudan, the situation only got more desperate.

Child marriage 
Mohammed also highlights the urgent protection needs of women and girls. “Gender-based violence is widespread. Armed men, early marriage, sexual exploitation—it’s everywhere.” Families marry off girls as young as 12. “Fathers can’t feed their children or protect them. They think marriage is a way out for daughters. One less mouth to feed.” Plan International offer psychosocial support, but the needs far outstrip the resources. “Protection gets a small sliver of the budget. Life-saving aid comes first. But we always include a gender-sensitive lens.”
The other looming threat is the lost generation of young men. “Before the war, I worked on youth employment. Now, those programmes are on hold.” With the economy collapsed and livelihoods gone, youth are being recruited by armed groups—including those fighting in Sudan, and potentially, abroad. “We risk exporting desperation. Without hope in Sudan, they may offer their frustration and anger to every warlord and conflict in the region and beyond. If we don’t give them options, they’ll take whatever they can.”

Despite everything, Mohammed remains hopeful. “Sudan is rich in land, agriculture, cattle—our people just need security and guidance. We are 40 million people in a country that could feed us all and more. We’ve come through worse. We’ll rebuild again.”

Photos: Marco de Swart