The RSF Is Starving Darfur's Displaced to One Meal a Day

Picture a mother in Ag Geneina, capital of West Darfur, counting the grains of food left in her pot. She is not counting to plan a feast. She is counting to see whether her children will eat once today or go to sleep hungry again. Across the Al Riyad displacement site, a family is living on a single meal a day, and the neighbours who share their last bit of flour are running out too.

We have seen this story before. We are living it again. Why are we still treating it as a tragedy that simply happened, when it is a crisis that someone is causing?

Al Riyad was established in 2003 to shelter people fleeing an earlier round of violence in Darfur. Twenty-three years later, it is still here, and it is still full. It is organised into four clusters, A through D, and most of its residents are not temporary guests. They are families who have been displaced for so long that the camp has become their address, their school, their market and their graveyard. Then came the fighting that broke out in April 2023, when the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese Armed Forces turned their guns on the country they were supposed to protect. Displacement waves followed. New families arrived at a camp that was already struggling to feed the people it had.

Consider what has been taken from them. Community representatives report that some households crossed into Chad during the worst periods of insecurity, fleeing across a border with nothing but what they could carry. Think about what it means to abandon your home, cross into a foreign country, and then return to a camp where the health system is collapsing. This is not a country at peace with its displaced citizens. This is a country whose armed factions have made displacement a permanent condition.

The health system is the part that should keep every African awake at night. One health facility at Al Riyad closed in 2023. Another shut in February 2026. The remaining clinics are now absorbing the patients of two facilities, and the pressure is crushing them. When a clinic closes in a camp like this, a child with diarrhoea becomes a child who dies of dehydration. A woman in labour becomes a woman who delivers in the dust. A diabetic father becomes a man who simply stops taking insulin because the queue is hours long and the supplies have run out. These are not statistics. They are funerals waiting to happen.

Shelter and food are collapsing at the same time. Newly arrived households have no shelter, no stored food and no income, so they depend on relatives and neighbours who are themselves barely surviving. The ACSS factsheet describes families eating only once a day. Let that sink in. In the twenty-first century, in a country that has produced some of the continent's most fertile farmland, families are being pushed to the edge of hunger because the men with guns cannot agree on who runs the state.

Who benefits from this? Not the widow in Cluster C. Not the schoolchild who has not seen a classroom since the fighting began. The war profiteers are the ones eating well, and they are doing it at the expense of a population that has no army, no lobby and no voice in the capitals that matter.

Here we must be honest about the wider pattern. Sudan's war did not begin in a vacuum. Armed factions on both sides have been fuelled by money, weapons and political backing from outside the country. Investigators and UN experts have repeatedly documented how weapons and funds reach the belligerents through neighbouring states, and several governments in the region and beyond have been named in these reports. The United Arab Emirates has denied supplying the RSF, and those denials must be tested independently, not accepted on trust. The same question applies to every outside power pouring arms, money or mercenaries into Sudan's gold fields and military contracts. Whether they are Gulf monarchies, Russian private military companies or Western governments that talk about human rights while protecting their commercial interests, the test is the same: does your involvement help families eat, or does it help warlords stay in power? If it is the latter, you are not a partner. You are an accomplice.

We must also name the crimes in West Darfur specifically. Ag Geneina has been the scene of some of the war's most horrific violence, including attacks on the Masalit community in 2023 that UN investigators and human rights organisations described as possible ethnic cleansing. The International Criminal Court has opened an investigation into crimes in Darfur. Justice has been slow, and the victims at Al Riyad know exactly how slow it has been. When perpetrators are not held accountable, the message to every armed commander in Sudan is that starving civilians is a cost of doing business.

So what should happen? The first demand is unhindered humanitarian access. Aid agencies must be able to reach Al Riyad and other sites without being looted, blocked or taxed by armed groups. The African Union's Peace and Security Council should press both the SAF and the RSF to guarantee safe corridors, and it should put names on the table of commanders who obstruct them. The second demand is funding that reaches clinics, not conference halls. Reopening the two closed health facilities at Al Riyad would cost far less than the lives lost when they stay shut. The third demand is accountability. The ICC needs cooperation, arrest warrants need enforcement, and sanctions must follow the money: the financiers, the arms brokers and the shell companies that keep this war alive.

Africa has shown us what functioning states look like. Botswana built a diamond-driven economy on transparent institutions and sustained investment in its people, and it has held elections for decades. Mauritius turned a sugar island into a financial and manufacturing hub by protecting property rights and building independent courts. Senegal proved in 2024 that peaceful alternation of power is possible when citizens refuse to let leaders cling to office. None of these countries is perfect, but each proves that strong institutions, rule of law and accountable government produce bread on the table. Sudan can be one of these stories. It cannot become one while its army and its militias treat civilians as collateral.

Sudan's leaders, both the generals in Port Sudan and the paramilitary commanders in Darfur, must understand that the continent is watching, and that Africans are no longer willing to accept war as normal. Civil society groups in Sudan, the business community across the region and the African diaspora can all press for transparent aid tracking, public reporting on arms flows, and sanctions on those who profit from famine. Regional bodies must stop hiding behind diplomatic language and start naming names.

We are the generation that will decide whether Al Riyad becomes a memory or a permanent address. Every family in that camp is asking the same question: has anyone out there noticed we are still alive? Answer them. Share this story until it is impossible to ignore. Demand that your government and the African Union press for humanitarian corridors, reopened clinics and ICC accountability. Refuse to let the phrase "complex crisis" excuse the people who are doing this.

Count the meals. Count the clinics. Count the children who will not see another birthday because someone decided their survival was negotiable. Then ask yourself whether you are willing to keep counting in silence.

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB