Sudanese aid worker: “It feels like someone turned off the light on us”
When Akhiar Osman speaks, her voice carries the weight of hundreds of women who can no longer speak for themselves.
In a dusty community centre in eastern Sudan’s Gedaref State, Akhiar, 39, sorts through records of displaced women who once leaned on her organization for survival – women who can no longer access medication, food or safety since the US and other donors abruptly halted humanitarian funding.
“Even one dollar could save a life here,” she said.
Akhiar heads the Organization of Women with Disabilities, a Sudanese non-governmental organization (NGO) that operated for more than seven years but is now on the brink of collapse. Once partly funded by US contributions, the NGO’s other lifelines were also severed by a sweeping freeze in international aid – a move that many equate not just to abandonment but to a death sentence.
Gedaref hosts about 830,000 displaced people, many of whom fled violence and atrocities in Darfur and Khartoum. Fifteen per cent of them live with disabilities. “They are the forgotten among the forgotten,” Akhiar said. “And they are the first to feel the pain when help stops.”
She recalls the small things that once made a big difference: a packet of hypertension pills that could prevent a stroke; a US$50 cash grant that helped a widow start a food stall and feed her family; a clean jug of water in a refugee tent where cholera lurks in every drop. These things were never luxury items – they were a means of survival.
Akhiar shares how one man lost his vision after missing several doses of diabetes medication, and how a woman’s untreated joint infection left her permanently disabled.
“We’re not talking about millions [of dollars]. Just tens of dollars. That’s all it would have taken.”
Meanwhile, the aid pipeline has run dry.
Without funding, Akhiar’s team can no longer provide emergency aid or livelihood training. The NGO’s staff, mostly women with disabilities themselves, will lose their jobs, a vital source of income not only for themselves but for their extended family. The chain reaction is brutal and immediate: hunger, untreated illness, hopelessness.
“It feels like someone turned off the light on us,” she said. “The war destroyed our homes, but the funding cuts destroy our future.”
Despite the challenges, Akhiar hopes the world is still listening.
More than 1,300 km away, in Ad Du’ayn, East Darfur State, Mokhtar Musa Kharter stands outside the modest house his family calls home. It has no running water, no electricity and now no aid. His 20 family members share the space, surviving with little security and scarce food.
East Darfur is one of Sudan’s most remote areas. Since the war broke out two years ago, aid organizations have struggled to access the region due to fighting and other constraints.
In January 2025, Mokhtar and his family finally received humanitarian aid. The initial cash payment of 280,000 Sudanese pounds (about $140) was barely enough, but it allowed them to buy food and medicine and regain some dignity.
Then, without warning, the aid stopped.
“No one told us why,” Mokhtar said. “It just ended. We waited and we hoped, but nothing came.”
Growing protection threats
With no resources and no clarity, families like Mokhtar’s now face growing threats – not just from disease or starvation, but from abductions, looting and the lawlessness that pervades this conflict-hit region.
“Women are harassed even when they go to get water,” he said. “There’s nowhere safe anymore. We don’t want to live on aid forever, but without it we won’t live at all.”
The war in Sudan has created one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, with more than 12 million people displaced within Sudan and abroad in two years, and almost two thirds of the population in need of aid. The recent funding cuts have devastated humanitarian operations across the country. More than 70 per cent of the local community kitchens – a lifeline for millions of people – have reportedly shut down.
The US was the largest funding source for humanitarian operations across Sudan for many years. The UN and partners are now deeply concerned about the severe impact of funding cuts on millions of women, children and other vulnerable people in Sudan.
Through the 2024 Humanitarian Response Plan, the humanitarian community in Sudan requested $2.7 billion from donors. About $1.8 billion was received, of which the US contributed almost half ($805.7 million). Overall, 15.6 million people were reached with some form of humanitarian assistance.
At least half of the international NGOs delivering life-saving assistance across Sudan rely on US funding. Many national NGOs worked with them as implementing partners and hence depended heavily on US funding indirectly.
The impact of funding cuts on humanitarian organizations is devastating, but it is catastrophic for the millions of women, children and other vulnerable groups across Sudan who desperately need humanitarian assistance.
“When the world stops looking, we stop living,” Mokhtar said.