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Sudan Hunger Crisis, the war the world is forgetting
Three and a half years in, the numbers are still growing and the cameras have gone. At a camp called Amtar, a kitchen run by the people who live there cooks two meals a day. This is what we found, and what steps are we taking trying to end the Sudan hunger crisis.
Amtar camp, Sudan, 2026.
Three and a half years of war
Sudan has been at war since April 2023, and most of the world has stopped looking.
The numbers have not stopped growing. The World Food Programme now says 20 million people in Sudan face acute hunger, and 14 million have been forced from their homes, in what it calls the world’s largest hunger and displacement crisis. In September the WFP warned that it may have to scale back its own aid in Sudan within weeks, because the money to run it is not there (World Food Programme, 2026, cited in Massoud, 2026).
We are not the WFP. We are a small team of doctors and volunteers who went to Sudan because people asked us to, and who keep going back. This is what we found, and what we are doing about it.
Amtar: the camp no one had reached
Earlier this year our team drove out to a tent city called Amtar. In the words of the team member who filmed it, it was “a camp that no one’s been to yet.”
About 2,000 displaced people were living there on open sand. The community leaders sat down with us and told us what they needed, and it was not complicated: food, and clean water. The families were drinking the water that was being used to irrigate the fields and to water the camels. No other organisation had reached them.
That is what three and a half years of war looks like once the cameras have left. Not one dramatic day, but thousands of people in a place with no name on the news, drinking from a trough.
Reduce the effects of Sudan hunger crisis we started a kitchen
We did not truck in food parcels and leave. We built a kitchen inside the camp, run by the people who live there.
It cooks two meals a day for the families at Amtar. The supplies go in by the truckload: pasta, rice, lentils, tomato paste, onions, potatoes, oil, sugar, bread, and the charcoal to cook it all on. The women of the camp do the cooking. One of them, on camera on an evening when the food had come, put it like this:
“Today, praise be to Allah, we have reached a nourishing meal despite the suffering and the hard conditions.”
One of the women who cook at the Amtar Camp Kitchen, 2026.
A kitchen like this runs on donations and on nothing else. There is no government grant behind it and no agency budget. When the money stops, the fire goes out. That is the plain arithmetic of it, and it is why we are writing this.
When will the Sudan hunger crisis end?
There is more to it than only the hunger crisis. The country is bleeding on all fronts.
The hospitals are hungry too
Food is the first thing. It is not the only thing.
In April, 80 of our doctors spent a fortnight in Sudan’s Northern State, operating on gunshot wounds, spinal injuries and fractures that had healed badly for want of a surgeon, and running clinics for displaced families. The World Health Organization and Sudan’s Federal Ministry of Health wrote to thank them afterwards (World Health Organization and Federal Ministry of Health, 2026). The WHO also says that 37% of Sudan’s health facilities are no longer working (World Health Organization, 2026).
On that trip we asked one hospital to show us its oxygen plant. A member of staff walked us through the compound and pointed at an empty concrete plinth. The plant stood there until it was bombed. Without it there is no surgery, no care for a newborn who cannot breathe on her own, and no treatment for severe pneumonia; the hospital runs on cylinders when it can get them. We are raising the money to put a plant back, and on 1 November our doctors go back to Sudan.
What your money does
- £1,500 keeps 200 families at Amtar fed for a week.
That is the whole kitchen: the truck, the supplies, the charcoal, two cooked meals a day for everyone in the camp.
- A family’s week costs a few pounds.
If £1,500 is more than you can give, give less. The kitchen is paid for in parts, by many people.
- There is a hospital waiting for its oxygen.
If it is less than you can give, the same gift goes towards the plant we are putting back.
References
- Massoud, A. (2026) ‘Sudan food aid could be cut within weeks, WFP warns, as 20 million face acute hunger’, The National, 14 September. Available at: thenationalnews.com (Accessed: 10 October 2026).
- World Health Organization (2026) After three years of conflict, Sudan faces a deeper health crisis. News release, 14 April. Geneva: WHO. Available at: who.int (Accessed: 10 October 2026).
- World Health Organization and Federal Ministry of Health, Sudan (2026) Letter to Doctors of Rahman, 15 June. Unpublished.
