Children are always the innocent casualties of war. Nowhere is that truer than today in Sudan, where 700,000 of the one million people already displaced by the country’s civil wars are boys and girls who have lost their homes, their schools and in many cases their families from whom they are now separated.
Already, in just over a month, 220,000 people have become stateless refugees, with children again the majority. While western attention is rightly focused on the displaced of Ukraine on the borders of the European Union, we are neglecting Sudan.
What started as a power struggle between rival generals in Khartoum is now reigniting inter-communal tensions across Sudan, with violence rapidly spreading with hundreds of civilians killed and thousands wounded. Amid the chaos and atrocities, reports of increased sexual violence are emerging and the risk of a famine is looming.
Education Cannot Wait (ECW), the UN’s global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises, has just returned from the border region of Chad with Sudan, where more than 60,000 refugees have already arrived; seven out of ten of them are children. The UN estimates 860,000 people may flee Sudan as refugees as the conflict escalates.
Our mission found that in this barren, remote corner of Chad basic services and infrastructures are almost non-existent. Refugees huddle in tenuous, makeshift settlements, crammed in the desert dust.
The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) and its partners are working around the clock to provide relief. But in the absence of resources, our humanitarian obligations cannot be met for the refugee families are to be found camping out in rudimentary shelters made only from loincloths and sticks, with a few scattered trees for their sole protection from the relentless sun.
Time is of the essence if relief is to save lives: with temperatures now topping 40C no one can survive long without water, food and proper shelter.
There are now high rates of malnutrition among children and pregnant women, including teenage girls, and yet healthcare is barely available. ECW met two women who had just delivered baby girls in these dire conditions, anxious about what the future holds for them. We heard reports of young mothers asking humanitarian workers to take their babies from them so they could be better cared for.
When families are displaced the first call on humanitarian agencies is for food, shelter and medicine, but for mothers and children it is also basic schooling. But when we spoke to refugees and asked them what their needs are, parents, adolescents and children all mentioned education as a top priority. “With education our children can be empowered,” one mother told us. “They will be able to thrive, provide for themselves and contribute to the community.” Another parent told us: “Education gives us hope.”
We need to help maintain that hope. For hope not only dies when food convoys cannot get through to besieged areas and life saving medicines are not available for diseased children. Hope also dies when children cannot begin to prepare and plan for a future.
It is time for the world to focus on relief efforts in all of Sudan’s neighbouring countries receiving refugees, including the Central African Republic, Egypt, Ethiopia, South Sudan and most of all Chad, which must be commended for hosting one of the largest refugee populations in Africa while facing multiple other crises.
The number of refugees has doubled because of the impact of droughts and increasingly frequent and extreme climate-induced disasters. Unsurprisingly the Central African Republic, Chad and South Sudan rank in the bottom five of the human development index.
The impact is measurable not only in poverty and deprivation but in lost lives. Despite all the medical advances, which in theory should save lives, girls here now suffer some of the highest mortality rates in the world.
As this tragedy continues to deepen, it is not enough for us to stand in solidarity with the women, men and children forced to flee for their lives and with the countries who open their borders to welcome them. The Sudan crisis has the potential to destabilise the whole region. What is at stake is the future of an entire generation in one of the most volatile areas of the world.
Resources must start to flow. ECW has announced an initial $3 million for the response in Chad. The UN and partners just launched a $3 billion appeal to meet the most immediate humanitarian needs in Sudan and neighbouring countries, including education. We know that in recent years only half of the UN’s humanitarian appeals — for about $35 billion this year — are ever met. When the war in Ukraine triggered the most important influx of refugees in Europe’s recent history, we saw both solidarity and a generous response; the same international co-operation and burden sharing must be forthcoming in Africa.
The West in particular must not be accused of double standards again. By delivering food, shelter, education and healthcare, Education Cannot Wait and Unicef can change the future with its allies.
A few hours away from the incoming refugees in eastern Chad are the camps set up in 2005 to host those fleeing the Darfur war. Over the years, the camps have been supported by UNHCR and partners, including schools that are integrated in the national education system as part of Chad’s progressive policy on refugees.
In Chad, a 24-year-old named Saleh told our ECW director: “I arrived in Chad as a refugee and completed my education at this camp. Today I teach children born here, so they can go on to work at ministries and institutions and show those who help us the fruit of their aid.” Saleh spent 18 years in this camp.
And yet the dreams of the 222 million crisis-impacted girls and boys worldwide who urgently need support to access safe schools too often end in brutal reality: child marriage, early pregnancies, forced labour, trafficking and forced recruitment into armed groups.
As part of the $3 billion Sudan crisis global appeal, UNHCR and its partners now require $26.5 million to kickstart education interventions in the five host countries. Time is running short. We have weeks to find the courage to offer the children like those we met on the border of Sudan, the opportunity to walk in the footsteps of Saleh.
Gordon Brown is a former UK prime minister, UN global education envoy and chair of Education Cannot Wait’s high-level steering group. Yasmine Sherif is director of Education Cannot Wait
