For years, Sudan has been mired in conflict. The United Nations is now breaking down the brutal costs the war has exacted from the nation’s women.
This week, the international peace organization released a report that details the “horrific” conditions women have been living through. They “tell us that they’ve endured starvation, displacement, rape and bombardment,” Anna Mutavati, UN Women Regional Director for East and Southern Africa, announced during a press conference on the publication.
And as infrastructure is increasingly compromised by looting and destruction, healthcare facilities and maternity hospitals have been devastated – and “pregnant women have given birth in the streets.”
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The cumulative result: Sudanese women feel there are “no safe spaces” left.
The threat of sexual assault is an especially prevalent problem for women in the northern African country, as they attempt to care for their homes and families by collecting water and firewood, only to be attacked along their ways. Indeed, these tasks carry “a high risk of sexual violence,” Mutavati said. “There is mounting evidence that rape is being deliberately and systematically used as a weapon of war.”
Starvation, too, is disproportionately impacting the women of Sudan. “Women often skip meals so that their children can eat, while adolescent girls frequently get the smallest share, undermining their long-term nutrition and health,” per Mutavati. It’s common in times of crisis throughout the world, she adds, that “women and girls [often] eat the least, and they eat last.”
The overarching conflict in Sudan began in 2023, when a longtime power struggle between the nation’s army and a powerful paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces, erupted in military conflict. Over 150,000 people have died as these factions continue to battle, and 12 million have become refugees in search of more peaceful places to live.
Aid programs are doing all they can to help – though, around the world (both in and beyond Sudan), groups that work on behalf of impoverished women are struggling to stay afloat as international funding dries up. That’s largely due to the decision made by President Donald Trump’s administration to dramatically cut funding to aid such work abroad.
Tom Fletcher, the top humanitarian official at the United Nations, called upon the world community to better help programs working on behalf of women in Sudan. The “UN Charter pledged us to save generations from scourge of war, defend human rights and justice,” he recently said. “Amid horror … we must return to those words as rebuke for international failure, and challenge that the world can do better.”
But in the meantime, in Sudan, Mutavati said that “basic dignity has … collapsed.”
