Sudan has an estimated population of 50 million people, 42 percent of whom are under 14 years old. The war has been raging since April 2023, and because of it, 16 million Sudanese children now urgently need humanitarian assistance.
Around 17 million children are out of school, and 90 percent lack access to formal education, according to Save the Children. Nearly 40 years of child immunisation progress has been reversed, with cholera rife and children now at risk of widescale, preventable diseases.
Nearly four million children under the age of five in Sudan are suffering from acute malnutrition. The entire population of el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur that has been under an RSF siege for over 500 days, are living in famine conditions.
Displacement has hit children hardest, the Raoul Wallenberg Centre says. Of the more than 12 million displaced people, 53 percent are children, making Sudan’s child displacement crisis the largest in the world.
In April 2025, the UN verified a “dramatic increase in grave violations against children… especially in the Darfur region, with children being killed and maimed at unprecedented levels”.
Despite the scale of this crisis, funding gaps are enormous. The Raoul Wallenberg Centre says: “Life-saving assistance is needed for 15 million children, yet Unicef is facing a deficit of $1 billion for this year’s operations in Sudan.”
“Children are dying from hunger, disease and direct violence. They are being cut off from the very services that could save their lives. This is not hypothetical. It is a looming catastrophe,” Sheldon Yett, Unicef’s Sudan representative, said.
“We are on the verge of irreversible damage to an entire generation of children not because we lack the knowledge or the tools to save them, but because we are collectively failing to act with the urgency, and at the scale this crisis demands.”
The report also includes an index of companies linked to the war or warring parties.
These include corporate entities owned by members of the UAE’s ruling family, a French aerospace company, a Colombian mercenary contractor, a Turkish arms manufacturer, an Australian mining company and more than one U.S. conglomerate.
“Despite the staggering scale of the emergency, the international response remains gravely inadequate,” the Raoul Wallenberg Centre says, “marked by an inexcusable shortfall in humanitarian funding, a shameful void in credible conflict-resolution initiatives, and a neglect of justice and accountability efforts.”