By BBC
The freezing of United States (US) humanitarian assistance has forced the closure of almost 80 percent of the emergency food kitchens set up to help people left destitute by Sudan’s civil war, the BBC has learned.
Aid volunteers said the impact of President Donald Trump’s executive order halting contributions from the US government’s development organisation (USaid) for 90 days meant more than 1,100 communal kitchens had shut.
It is estimated that nearly two million people struggling to survive have been affected.
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The conflict between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces has killed tens of thousands of people, forced millions from their homes and left many facing famine since it erupted in April 2023.
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The kitchens are run by groups known as emergency response rooms, a grass roots network of activists who stayed on the frontlines to respond to the crises in their neighbourhoods.
“People are knocking on the volunteers’ doors,” said Duaa Tariq, one of the emergency room organisers. “People are screaming from hunger in the streets.”
The Trump administration abruptly suspended all US aid last month to determine whether it was “serving US interests”, and moved to begin dismantling USaid.
The State Department has issued an exemption for emergency food assistance, but Sudanese groups and others say there is significant confusion and uncertainty about what that means in practice.
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The normal channels for processing a waiver through USaid no longer exist, and it is not clear if cash assistance–on which the communal kitchens depend–will be restored, or only goods in-kind.
According to some estimates, USaid provided 70 to 80 percent of the total funding to these flexible cash programmes.
The closure of the majority of Sudan’s emergency kitchens is being seen as a significant setback by organisations working to tackle the world’s largest hunger crisis, with famine conditions reported in at least five locations.
The network of communal feeding centres relied in the early stages of the country’s civil war on community and diaspora donations but later became a focal point for funding from international agencies struggling to access the conflict zones, including USaid.
It is a “huge setback” says Andrea Tracy, a former USaid official who has set up a fund, the Mutual Aid Sudan Coalition, for private donations to the emergency rooms.
