Seventeen million kids in Sudan desperately need aid – more than every child in Britain

Why does no-one seem to care? This is the question I’ve kept asking myself after visiting Sudan. Over three years into a brutal conflict, Sudan has become the world’s largest child displacement crisis, and yet it remains one of the least talked about. The war has devastated cities, collapsed basic services and forced millions from their homes. But outside of brief headlines, it struggles to register in the global conversation.

The numbers are absolutely staggering; five million children have been forced from their homes and 17 million are in need of aid. An education, a roof over their heads, a safe place to sleep and food to eat – these are the very basics every child should have. To put that in perspective, that is more than all the children in the UK going without these basic things, can you imagine? And yet the crisis has only received 16% of the funding it needs for aid this year, and very little of the world’s attention. These are kids like yours and mine and they deserve the same chances in life.

For seven days I travelled across the country, seeing the lifesaving work of Save the Children and meeting the families struggling to survive in what is the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. One thing that has stuck with me are the children i met in a hospital in Khartoum. Many of them had been injured by explosive weapons, a growing and devastating feature of this conflict. As I walk through the hospital we meet Dr Jamal. A surgeon who has stayed in the city since the war broke out in 2023.

“From the first days of the war, most of the patients we received were children. They are the majority of the injured,” he tells me. At one point, the facility found itself on the frontline, deluged by patients critically injured in the fighting. Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed so far in the war, making it one of the world’s most deadly. “There are very severe injuries from shelling; drone strikes and bombardment. Many of them don’t survive,” says Dr Jamal.

At its peak the hospital received 150 patients a day, people treated in the corridors, on the floor or even outside. Many of them children. Two doctors and two security guards were killed in shelling and drone attacks. He tells me the hospital was hit four times during the height of the fighting.

This follows a pattern across the country where over 200 health facilities have reportedly been attacked and destroyed according to the WHO, and hundreds are likely close as a result of shortages in funding. Leaving thousands caught up in the conflict with nowhere to go to access simple healthcare.

Dr Jamal says: “We simply don’t have what we need, even oxygen and basic equipment are a struggle.” He points to the ceiling of the office, saying it has been shelled four times, and they haven’t been able to get it repaired.

As we wander through the corridors of the dimly-lit hospital, we come to a small room, where two boys are sitting on different beds with their parents. Dr Jamal introduces us to them one by one, describing who they are, where they are from and the surgery performed. As we’re introduced, 15-year-old Bilal looks up, and I immediately notice the scaring on the right side of his face, and the fact one eye doesn’t immediately follow the other one. As I look down in notice part of his right arm is missing too.

Dr Jamal then introduces Bilal’s 19-year-old cousin Karim, sitting on the opposite side of the room and wearing a black hood. As we talk, he pulls it back to reveal significant scaring, and parts of his ear that are missing. As we talk, we’re told that both boys were injured in the same incident.

They were out farming with their father, when Bilal discovered a shiny object in the soil. As he did so, his cousin knew what this was, and tried to pull his cousin away from danger. The device exploded immediately. Critically injuring both boys. They were brought to the hospital and treated by Dr Jamal. After several operations, they managed to save most of Bilal’s arm but lost his hand and his eye. Karim, his cousin, suffered critical injuries to his skull, is now deaf and lost part of his left ear.

“When it went off, it blew me into the air and my hand was severed.” says Bilal.

Save the Children helped them receive urgent medical treatment and ongoing care during their recovery. This included support for his treatment in hospital, as well as providing meals and care for the family during their stay. Sadly, theirs is not an isolated story.

Across Sudan, explosive weapons are leaving a devastating mark on civilians. Thousands have been injured since the conflict began, with reports from Action on Armed Violence showing double the number of casualties from explosive weapons in 2025 compared to 2023. And we know children are particularly vulnerable, being on average seven times more likely to die as a result of blast injuries.

But these are not battlefield injuries. They are happening to children. When playing with their friends, walking home from school, or at home with their families. We then walk a short distance down the hall and meet 15-year-old Mariam whose story is the most heart-breaking of all, but equally the most inspiring.

She is sat on a bed with her parents, her feet still wrapped in bandages. She’s had multiple surgeries to repair her legs after they were shredded in a drone strike. In 2024 she was walking home with her sister from a local market during the height of the conflict in Khartoum.

“I was walking with my sister when a drone hit. We didn’t hear anything. I lost consciousness, and when I woke up, I was told she had been killed,” she says. Mariam was left with devastating injuries. They brought her sister’s body to the hospital, and her father buried her later that day.

She spent the next six months in hospital, receiving multiple surgeries to her legs so that she might be able to walk again. Whilst fighting raged around the city. Mariam has already undergone two major operations and faces at least two more surgeries. Save the Children is providing her with on-going psychosocial support and care.

Despite the long and painful recovery, Mariam* remains determined. She lost two years of school because of her injuries but has now returned to the classroom. Before the attack she dreamed of becoming a doctor. That dream remains unchanged. She says she wants to help people in the future in the same way the doctors who treated her helped save her life.

And that’s what stays with you. Not just the scale of the crisis, but the basics of childhood that has been taken away. School. Safety. A future that every child deserves. No child should have to learn how to walk again. No child should have to live through this. And yet, millions in Sudan are, and with seemingly no end in sight.

The reality is crises like Sudan become normalised, underfunded, and the world moves on. But we can’t let that happen. Join our campaign, write to your MP and stand up for Sudan.

(Names of children have been changed)

Visit savethechildren.org.uk/how-you-can-help/emergencies/sudan-crisis