KHARTOUM/PORT SUDAN — Sudan’s health system, already shattered by more than three years of war, is being hit by a second crisis: the money keeping clinics, medical workers and medicine supply chains alive is disappearing.
Doctors Without Borders, or Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), is warning that international funding cuts are forcing health facilities across Sudan to close just as millions of people face conflict, displacement, infectious disease and severe hunger.
And the consequences are beginning to show up not only in shuttered clinics, but in overcrowded hospitals and longer, more dangerous journeys for patients who still manage to find care.
The War Broke the System. Funding Cuts Are Squeezing What Remains
Sudan’s civil war erupted in April 2023 after tensions between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, exploded into full-scale fighting.
More than three years later, the conflict has killed at least 59,000 people according to figures cited by AP, displaced millions and pushed entire communities into extreme food insecurity. The true death toll may be substantially higher because comprehensive nationwide reporting is difficult during an active war.
The country’s health infrastructure was devastated early.
WHO said in April that 37% of Sudan’s health facilities were nonfunctional nationwide, while facilities in the most heavily affected conflict zones have faced even greater disruption. Hospitals, ambulances, patients and medical workers have repeatedly come under attack.
Now another pressure is accelerating the damage: donor money is drying up.
36 More Facilities Closing — Nearly Half a Million People Affected
The International Rescue Committee told the Associated Press that funding losses are forcing the closure of 36 IRC-supported health facilities and sites, potentially cutting off essential services for around 473,700 people.
Some facilities have survived temporarily using bridge funding, but that support was expected to last only through the end of September.
This comes after a much broader warning from the Sudan Health Cluster in June.
The WHO-led coordination body said the end of key U.S.-linked funding threatened 335 facilities and services across 13 states, potentially affecting about 3.35 million people, including roughly 1.5 million internally displaced people.
The projected disruption included 126 primary health centers facing suspension, seven hospitals at risk of suspension and 20 mobile clinics potentially being halted, alongside scores of facilities operating at reduced capacity.
That warning was not hypothetical.
MSF says facilities have already begun disappearing.
Central Darfur Shows What the Cuts Look Like on the Ground
According to MSF, patient admissions at the facilities it supports in Central Darfur increased 22.5% between January and April 2026 compared with the same period in 2025.
Then, in May, 45 health centers in the area lost funding.
The result is a vicious cycle: community clinics close, patients travel farther, cases become more severe before treatment, and the remaining hospitals receive even more patients despite already limited beds, medicine and staff.
Sebastián Traficante, an MSF emergency coordinator in Darfur, described patients arriving after longer and more expensive journeys only to find hospitals themselves already stretched.
That is the central danger behind the latest funding crisis.
Closing one small clinic does not eliminate the medical need. It simply pushes that need somewhere else.
In One Camp, Pregnant Women Now Face a Three-Hour Journey for Surgery
The situation in eastern Sudan illustrates how quickly cuts can change access to lifesaving treatment.
Tanedba camp in Gedaref state houses about 18,400 displaced people. After another humanitarian organization left in June, its maternity and surgical wards closed, according to MSF.
MSF continues to operate an emergency service there, but women who need surgery during childbirth must now make a journey of roughly three hours to the nearest city.
At nearby Um Rakuba camp, home to around 17,000 people, the number of aid groups working in and around the settlement has fallen from approximately 35 in 2021 to fewer than 10, MSF says.
An MSF-supported hospital is now one of the remaining medical lifelines for refugees and local residents.
The Funding Collapse Goes Far Beyond Sudan
The cuts are part of a historic contraction in international aid.
Preliminary OECD figures show official development assistance from Development Assistance Committee members and associates fell 23.1% in 2025, the largest annual decline on record.
U.S. aid fell especially sharply, while Germany, Britain, Japan and France were also among the major donors contributing to the overall reduction.
Humanitarian ODA fell even faster — 35.8% — while bilateral assistance to sub-Saharan Africa declined 26.3%.
The OECD warns that additional reductions are expected in 2026, with health assistance among the sectors facing particularly severe pressure.
For Sudan, those global budget decisions translate directly into fewer clinics, fewer referrals and fewer organizations capable of stepping in when another provider leaves.
Disease Is Spreading While Medical Capacity Shrinks
Sudan is not dealing only with battlefield injuries.
WHO reported widespread outbreaks of malaria, dengue, measles, polio, hepatitis E, meningitis and diphtheria across multiple states earlier this year.
A new cholera outbreak declared in June subsequently spread across several regions. By July, WHO reported more than 1,330 cases and 114 deaths in affected areas at that stage of the outbreak.
MSF also told AP that measles had reached major outbreak levels in Darfur, with roughly three quarters of the patients it was seeing unvaccinated. Malaria and cholera were also adding pressure to the health system.
This is what makes clinic closures particularly dangerous: disease-control systems depend on early diagnosis, vaccination, surveillance, medication and referrals — services that become much harder to maintain when local health centers disappear.
Hunger Is Making Patients Even More Vulnerable
Sudan’s medical emergency is inseparable from its food crisis.
Nearly 19.5 million people — roughly two in five Sudanese — were experiencing crisis-level or worse acute food insecurity under the latest IPC assessment, according to the World Food Programme, FAO and UNICEF.
Around five million were at Emergency level, while hundreds of thousands faced the most severe conditions or lived in areas threatened by famine.
The agencies estimate that 825,000 children under five could suffer severe acute malnutrition during 2026.
Malnutrition weakens the body’s ability to fight disease, meaning collapsing health services and deteriorating food security reinforce one another.
Hospitals Themselves Have Become Targets
Funding is not the only reason Sudan’s medical capacity is disappearing.
Healthcare facilities and personnel have been repeatedly caught in — and directly affected by — the conflict.
WHO had verified 217 attacks on health care since April 2023, resulting in more than 2,000 deaths by April 2026.
The scale of the violence became especially stark in 2025.
WHO data cited by MSF recorded 1,620 deaths in attacks on health care in Sudan that year alone, representing more than 80% of the deaths from attacks on healthcare recorded by WHO in complex humanitarian emergencies globally during that period.
So even where money remains available, maintaining a functioning hospital can mean operating amid insecurity, damaged infrastructure and constant risk.
Nearly 34 Million People Need Humanitarian Help
The size of the crisis is difficult to overstate.
WHO estimates that nearly 34 million people need humanitarian assistance in Sudan, including about 21 million who need health assistance.
More than four million people were also projected to be acutely malnourished during 2026.
The broader 2026 UN humanitarian plan identifies 33.7 million people in need and aims to reach about 20.4 million, but funding remains far below what agencies say is required. Current UN figures put coverage at roughly 41%.
That gap helps explain why aid organizations are being forced to decide which facilities can stay open and which cannot.
The Most Dangerous Part May Be What Happens After a Clinic Closes
A closed health center is easy to count.
The people who never reach another hospital are much harder to measure.
A mother who now needs hours to reach emergency obstetric care, a child whose measles infection goes untreated, a malaria patient who arrives critically ill after traveling across insecure territory — these are the consequences aid groups fear will multiply as funding contracts.
MSF says its own Sudan operations are financed privately and therefore are not directly dependent on government funding. But that does not insulate its hospitals from the wider collapse.
When other providers close, their patients have to go somewhere.
Increasingly, they are arriving at the smaller number of facilities still operating.
The warning from Sudan is therefore about more than foreign-aid budgets.
It is about what happens when war destroys much of a health system — and the financial support keeping the remainder alive begins disappearing at the same time.
Sudan has already lost hospitals to fighting.
Now it risks losing more of its remaining healthcare network simply because there is no longer enough money to keep the doors open.
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