Sudan’s Children Need Healthcare Now — Not Another Lost Future

The boy we met didn’t ask for much.  He wants medical care.  He wants to go back to school. He wants to go home.

Instead, he has fled El Fasher, escaping violence and leaving everything behind. Now he is living far from home in a temporary settlement, displaced like millions of families across Sudan whose lives have been overturned by war.

I travelled across Sudan with Save the Children Internationals CEO, Inger Ashing to visit our programmes in Sudan.  Travelling across the country, meeting families in camps and communities sheltering those who have fled, one thing became clear: when healthcare disappears, hope disappears with it.

In many places, clinics have shut down. Medicines are hard to transport. Doctors and nurses have fled or gone unpaid. For families already struggling to survive, even a simple illness can become terrifying.  Some illnesses require urgent support that are life threatening and the deeply concerning extreme hunger and famine like conditions in parts of Sudan can be life ending for a child, as we’ve heard from our frontline staff.

But where health services still exist, there is hope that keeps families going.

In a healthcate centre in Khartoum, one doctor  we spoke to chose  to stay through intense fighting so he could continue treating patients. Now, as the city slowly stabilises, the clinic serves tens of thousands of people who have nowhere else to go. Women and children crowd the waiting areas every day, seeking care that means the difference between recovery and tragedy.

Similarly, in the Red Sea State, we visited a health centre supported by Save the Children. It was built for one community but now serves many more — families displaced by violence, mothers with newborn babies, children arriving weak from illness or malnutrition.  People walk for hours to reach it because treatment and medicines are free. Mothers come for pregnancy care. Children receive vaccines and treatment for malaria and other diseases.

Here, community members told us they fear the clinic could close again. They remember when services stopped for years and how many people suffered. They asked us, quietly but urgently, not to let that happen again. For them, this clinic is a lifeline.

But there is so much more to do.  The evolving dynamics of the conflict mean that in parts of the country where children have fled to, families are in desperate need of medical care.  In Atbara, we met many of those families who had fled El Fasher, travelling almost 1000km, mainly on foot.  Women carried young children while pregnant. One mother told us she lost her baby during the journey. Children spoke softly about the violence they had seen.

In the camp, a midwife showed us how she helps women give birth at night using only the light from her mobile phone. Equipment and medicines are scarce, but health workers still do what they can, even though many of them are displaced themselves.

Today, across Sudan, children are growing up with trauma, illness and uncertainty. Many cannot access even basic healthcare, let alone the mental health support they need after everything they have endured.

We know what helps. Clinics that stay open. Health workers who are supported. Medicines that reach the communities that need them.

But funding for Sudan’s crisis response is dangerously low, putting lifesaving services at risk.

Children here are not asking for much. Just the chance to be healthy, to learn, and to grow up in peace and to return home.

We cannot let them lose that chance.