“Humanitarian needs are getting worse every day” for the approximately 400,000 Sudanese refugees who have fled the fighting to neighboring Chad, the NGO Handicap International warned on Wednesday October 4, affirming that “from 1,500 to 2,000 people cross every day the border “. These people “live in disastrous conditions, lacking everything, including water, food, shelter, medical care”, and “the few NGOs present on site […] are facing a major humanitarian emergency which is will deteriorate without immediate and substantial support from donor states,” the organization specifies in a press release.
In total, more than 400,000 people are now refugees in Chad, according to the UN, 86% of whom are women and children. Every day, many of them continue to cross the border after miles of walking to flee the bloody fighting in Sudan, which broke out on April 15 between the army and the paramilitaries, before the tribal militia also threw themselves into the battle.
Chad is the third least developed country in the world, according to the UN, and its health system, on its knees, often can do nothing for the most fragile. Before this new war, the country already welcomed some 410,000 Sudanese who fled the conflict in Darfur (west) in the 2000s, as well as tens of thousands of refugees from Cameroon and the Central African Republic. According to UN projections, another 200,000 new refugees from Sudan could arrive soon.