Hawa* had survived a forced marriage, the death of twin babies and was working towards a PhD when Rapid Support Forces (RSF) fighters stopped her at a checkpoint on the road out of El Fasher in Sudan. They gang-raped her for more than a week. Her release was paid for by friends sending money to her phone and her brother, who tried to intervene, was shot dead.
Abdullahi Boru Halakhe, a senior advocate at Refugees International, met her recently a camp in eastern Chad. Hawa is one of more than 900,000 Sudanese refugees living there. Halakhe has worked humanitarian crises across the continent for decades, but describes that trip to The Independent as the hardest of his career.
Three years on from the outbreak of Sudan’s war, eastern Chad has become the terminus of one of the largest displacement crises on earth. More than 1.3 million Sudanese refugees now live there – with more than 900,000 having arrived after fighting broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary RSF in April 2023. Now, the international community is cutting the money that keeps them alive.
Last week, two of the UN’s largest humanitarian agencies, the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR) and the World Food Programme (WFP), issued a joint warning that that assistance to more than a million people faces “drastic” cuts unless a $428 million (£317m) funding gap is filled. UNHCR can currently help only four in every ten refugees. The WFP has already halved food rations and may be forced to cut them again.
“Without urgent support from donors, this year will bring deeper cuts, worse conditions and even greater suffering for families who have already fled war”, says Patrice Ahouansou, UNHCR’s representative in Chad.
In Ennedi Est province, refugees are surviving on less than half what the World Health Organisation (WHO) sees as the minimum daily water requirement. A single teacher faces more than a hundred children in the largest classrooms. Some 80,000 families have no shelter. Seven in ten refugee families in Chad have reduced or skipped meals in the past month, according to a recent survey by international aid organisation the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).
Dermot Hegarty, the NRC’s country director in Chad, says temperatures are now at 43 degrees Celsius – and over the coming months it will exceed 50. He told The Independent: “The things that will be visibly shocking are people sitting under trees trying to get shade. Most of the families crossing are women and children – between 80 and 90 per cent – because some men stayed to tend what they were growing, some have gone to war, some have been murdered.” The shelters are plastic sheeting on wooden poles. In six months, he says, the plastic will have disintegrated and there is no money for anything more durable.
Water is trucked to transit camps and families queue for hours to collect a few litres – sometimes four per person per day, against a WHO minimum of 15. Hegarty says: “You kind of think water is just the essential and then you realise there isn’t any.” Open defecation spreads disease through sites holding tens of thousands of people.
Hegarty continues: “If I rewind a few years… the big UN agencies had deep pockets. UNHCR would already have temporary shelters built, latrines ready, maybe a health centre. Now every organisation is trying to scrounge money where we can. It’s very piecemeal.” US humanitarian funding for Chad fell from $338 million in 2024 to $112 million in 2025, according to the UN’s Financial Tracking Service. with Donald Trump having returned to the White House and immediately taken to to dismantling the United States Agency for International Development. Other Western donors, including the UK, have cut back too.
For the people inside the camps, the cuts layer onto a crisis that was already desperate. What drove people out of Sudan was not simply war but a campaign of extortion along the escape routes. Halakhe’s interviews describe RSF checkpoints as toll booths: families shaken down for cash, gold and jewellery, men separated, women assaulted. He says: “They are not fighting to govern. Theirs is purely an extraction framework. They see the Sudanese population as raw material.” One man told Halakhe that RSF fighters shot and killed his 13-year-old daughter and his 18-month-old son as the family fled. When he asked for their bodies, the fighters threatened him.
Insaf, 41, was a teacher with a master’s degree. RSF fighters stopped her on the same road, tore up her certificates and raped her for eight days. She says: “I don’t have parents, I don’t have kids and I have nothing to show for my education, since RSF tore my certificates.”
When El Fasher fell to the RSF in late 2025, the Yale School of Public Health assessed with “significant confidence” that mass killing followed. The Internatonla Criminal Court told the UN Security Council it had been “an organised, calculated campaign of the most profound suffering” – executions, rape, mass graves, filmed and celebrated by those committing them. The RSF deny all such allegations.
For those who survive the journey and reach Chad, what awaits is a slow, grinding emergency that rarely makes it onto front pages. Halakhe thinks about this constantly: “We have run out of superlatives to describe the Sudanese crisis. Genocide is the highest crime. Famine is the highest form of deprivation. What else do we need to say?”
Protection services for survivors of sexual violence have been hit hardest. Halakhe says: “If you are the person sitting across the desk with a budget cut of over 70 per cent, what do you do? Education goes first, then protection, then gender-based violence support – in that order.” The consequences compound in ways that are not always visible in the statistics. Without adequate water facilities or latrines, women leave the camp at night to find a quiet place and are assaulted, he says. Without caseworkers, survivors have nowhere to go. He continues: “You are running away from RSF GBV and find yourself facing gender-based violence in the camps.”
Hegarty does not know what happens in six months if the funding gap is not filled. WFP rations have gone from monthly, to every other month and then half-rations. They are now at quarter-rations and no one can say where the floor is. He says: “I keep thinking about an elastic band. You keep stretching, stretching, stretching. At what point does it snap? I really, honestly don’t know.” What he does know is what he sees: women holding infants who have not eaten since they crossed the border, men who were doctors and engineers sitting in camp with nothing to do.
The war is getting closer. Since December, drone strikes have hit towns along the Chad-Sudan frontier. At the end of March, a drone killed 17 people attending a funeral in Tine, where Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) runs the only medical facility in the area. In the two months prior, MSF staff had treated 457 wounded across 13 mass casualty incidents. Rita Magano, MSF’s medical project coordinator says: “We did not expect such a large influx of seriously wounded patients.” The team has since been forced to relocate, but says the security situation is making even basic medical care unsustainable.
Halakhe says: The last thing to go when you are displaced is your dignity. We are not even giving Sudanese that.”
*Names changed to protect identities
This article has been produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project
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