When war erupted in Sudan three years ago, the millions of Sudanese living with disabilities faced an immediate, life-threatening question that most crisis reporting has never adequately addressed: how do you flee violence you cannot outrun? How do you reach an aid distribution point you cannot navigate? Three years later, with more than 33 million people requiring humanitarian assistance according to the NGO Humanity & Inclusion, those questions have hardened into a systemic catastrophe. People with disabilities in Sudan are not just caught in a humanitarian crisis. They are trapped in one that was never designed to reach them.

Humanity & Inclusion has noted that in conflict-affected areas, the number of people with disabilities is likely far higher than prewar estimates, driven by injury, trauma, chronic health deterioration, and barriers to care. The organization stated that people with disabilities face extreme challenges in fleeing violence, accessing aid, and protecting themselves from harm. In a crisis defined by mass displacement, the ability to move quickly and reach scattered aid points is often the difference between survival and death. For millions of Sudanese with physical, sensory, or cognitive disabilities, that calculus is brutal — and it has been largely invisible in the international response.

A Crisis That Keeps Compounding — Especially for the Most Vulnerable

The trajectory of this war matters more than any single statistic. Since fighting broke out between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in April 2023, the situation has only worsened. Some displacement has reversed — reports indicate that by early 2026, millions had returned home, including hundreds of thousands from abroad. But those returns carry their own dangers, particularly for people with disabilities.

Humanity & Inclusion has warned that unexploded ordnance contaminates homes, schools, hospitals, places of worship, and roads, threatening civilians and restricting access to essential services. For a person navigating rubble with a mobility impairment, or a visually impaired person returning to a landscape seeded with antipersonnel mines, the risk is exponentially greater. Returning home does not mean returning to safety. For people with disabilities, it may mean returning to a more lethal version of the danger they fled.

The Disability Gap in Humanitarian Response

This is a dimension of the crisis that rarely gets the attention it demands, and the structural reasons are damning. Disability-specific aid programming requires specialized resources, trained personnel, and accessible infrastructure — assistive devices, sign-language interpreters, wheelchair-accessible distribution sites, information in accessible formats. All three are in catastrophically short supply across Sudan. The result is an aid system that, even where it functions, systematically excludes a significant portion of the people it is meant to serve.

The collapse of that aid system is not simply a function of scale. It is being actively undermined. The International Rescue Committee reported that bureaucratic requirements are delaying aid deliveries by up to six weeks. At a senior officials meeting in Brussels, the IRC’s Acting Sudan Country Director, Zeleka Bacha, described how nearly three years of conflict, economic collapse, and lack of humanitarian access has pushed millions into catastrophic conditions, with families surviving on one meal or less per day. When aid is delayed by six weeks, able-bodied populations suffer. People with disabilities who depend on specialized medication, assistive devices, or caregiver networks face a different order of crisis entirely.

The IRC also flagged a troubling funding dynamic. Many humanitarian projects funded by the United States are set to expire in the coming months, with deep uncertainty about whether they will be renewed. The United Nations launched a $1.6 billion appeal in February to support refugees across seven countries. The question is whether donors will respond at the scale the crisis demands — and whether any of that funding will be earmarked for disability-inclusive programming.

Hunger as a Weapon — With Unequal Casualties

Hundreds of thousands of people have faced catastrophic levels of food insecurity, classified as IPC Phase 5, in recent months. IPC 5 is the most severe classification. It means people are starving.

Earlier reporting from Space Daily highlighted malnutrition deaths in El-Fasher, where 63 people died in a single week. That city, the capital of North Darfur, has been one of the conflict’s most brutal flashpoints, with satellite imagery uncovering evidence of atrocities in and around the city. The UN has called for $6 billion to fight famine across Sudan, a figure that reflects both the depth of the crisis and the international community’s failure to contain it earlier.

Famine conditions are devastating for everyone. But for people with disabilities, the barriers compound: physical inability to travel to food distribution points, exclusion from community rationing networks, communication barriers that prevent them from learning when and where aid is available. When aid organizations report that people are dying of starvation in parts of Sudan every day, the invisible share of those deaths belongs disproportionately to people the system was never built to count.

Healthcare Under Attack, Disability Services Nonexistent

Sudan’s crisis does not exist in isolation. Across the broader region, attacks on healthcare facilities and humanitarian workers have become disturbingly routine. In neighboring South Sudan, airstrikes hit a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders in Jonglei state, leaving an unknown number of aid workers missing. MSF said it was the only health provider serving around 250,000 people in the affected area.

In Sudan, the pattern is similar. Healthcare facilities have been attacked or damaged in ongoing clashes, according to the IRC. The cumulative effect is a health system that was already weak before the war and has now effectively ceased to function in large parts of the country. For people with disabilities who depend on that system for rehabilitation services, prosthetics, mental health support, and chronic disease management, the collapse is not just a disruption. It is a severance from the conditions that made daily life possible.

What Must Change — Specifically and Immediately

The IRC described the Brussels senior officials meeting in March as an important opportunity to change course. The organization’s demands were specific: guarantee unfettered humanitarian access, increase diplomatic and peacebuilding efforts, ramp up flexible funding, and ensure that a significant portion of Sudan-directed funds go directly to local and national NGOs. These are not new requests. Aid organizations have been making them for months. The problem is one of political will.

But even if those demands were met tomorrow, they would not close the disability gap without deliberate, structural changes to how aid is designed and delivered. What is needed is concrete and actionable:

First, donors must mandate disability-inclusion standards as a condition of humanitarian funding. Every dollar directed at Sudan should require recipient organizations to demonstrate how their programming reaches people with disabilities — not as an afterthought, but as a baseline requirement. The IASC Guidelines on Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities in Humanitarian Action already exist. They need to be enforced, not merely referenced.

Second, humanitarian organizations operating in Sudan must disaggregate their data by disability status. You cannot serve a population you refuse to count. Without systematic data on where people with disabilities are, what barriers they face, and whether aid is reaching them, the exclusion will continue by default.

Third, organizations of persons with disabilities — Sudanese-led groups that understand the local context — must be funded directly and included in coordination mechanisms. Disability-inclusive aid cannot be designed exclusively by organizations that have no disabled people in their leadership structures.

Fourth, the international community must pressure all parties to the conflict to guarantee safe passage for humanitarian convoys carrying assistive devices, rehabilitation equipment, and specialized medical supplies. These are not luxury items. They are survival infrastructure.

Three years in, the war shows no signs of ending. The Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces remain locked in a conflict that has destroyed cities, displaced millions, and created famine conditions across broad swaths of the country. For the 33 million people who need help, the international response has been a mixture of alarm and inadequacy. But for the millions with disabilities who face the steepest barriers to survival, the failure is more specific: it is a humanitarian system that treats their exclusion as an acceptable cost of operating in crisis. That is not an inevitable outcome. It is a choice — and it can be reversed, if the political will and the funding follow the principles that the international community already claims to hold.

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