West Darfur still needs humanitarian help

Humanitarian aid is being rolled back, but people there still do not have access to adequate healthcare and sanitation.

Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF) has been working in Sudan’s Darfur region for years and launched operations in al-Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, in February 2021. Conflict in Darfur killed hundreds of thousands of people more than a decade ago. While the scale of the violence has since reduced, inter-communal violence still occasionally erupts.

Between January and April 2021, conflict killed more than 150 people and forced more than 100,000 from their homes. Krinding, a camp for internally displaced people (IDPs), was burned to the ground, leaving its residents homeless once again. Thousands of IDPs are now scattered across more than 100 so-called gathering sites – clusters of makeshift shelters in open areas or government buildings across the city. With the potential for further violence, many people are too scared to return to their villages.

MSF initially intervened by providing mass casualty training and mass casualty treatment kits to Al-Geneina Teaching Hospital. We decided to intervene longer-term after seeing an urgent need for clean water, sanitation and healthcare, as well as an inadequate humanitarian response. Where healthcare facilities do exist, usually only one part of the community feels they can safely access them.