Aid cuts will fill more dinghies than smugglers ever could
Sudan is the world's largest forced displacement crisis.
Listen to this article
It is also, somehow, routinely described as a "forgotten war." Estimates of the dead now range from 150,000 to 400,000. Nearly 25 million people are affected by famine, and around 4 million children are acutely malnourished. The United Nations has called it the worst humanitarian crisis in the world for women and girls, who make up over half of the displaced and are being deliberately targeted with sexual violence.
More than 11 million people have been forced from their homes inside Sudan alone, with several million more having crossed international borders. I saw the consequences for myself on a recent visit to Egypt with the Coalition for Global Prosperity. What I found was a reminder that a war can start as a domestic power struggle and end up as a crisis with continental and, I would argue, very direct British consequences.
Egypt now hosts approximately 1.5 million registered refugees who have fled the Sudanese conflict, placing enormous pressure on communities and humanitarian services. Unlike some of its neighbours, Egypt has never built a single refugee camp, so these are people living in Cairo and beyond.
At a UNHCR reception centre in Giza, I watched a system built to register 4000 people a month straining to 4,000 arrivals a day - mostly women and children, and older men, all of whom had fled their homes because of the war. Some........
