Three years after fighting erupted between Sudan's national army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the country is experiencing one of the world's worst humanitarian catastrophes. More than 40,000 people have been killed, roughly 14 million — a quarter of the population — have been displaced, and the economic and social fabric of one of Africa's largest nations has been torn apart. "We are not just facing a crisis — we are witnessing the systematic erosion of a country's future," Luca Renda, the United Nations Development Programme's resident representative in Sudan, said.

The scale of economic collapse is staggering. A joint UNDP and Institute for Security Studies report estimates that Sudan lost $6.4 billion in GDP in 2023 alone — the year the war began as army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo fought for control of the state. Industrial activity in major urban centres has collapsed by roughly 90 percent, up to 40 percent of power generation capacity has been lost, and the Sudanese pound has plummeted from around 570 to the dollar before the war to between 3,500 and 3,600 today. Average incomes have fallen to levels last seen in 1992. Even under an optimistic scenario of peace being reached in 2026, Sudan would still lose an estimated $18.8 billion in GDP by 2043.

The human cost is written into every sector. The World Health Organization has verified more than 200 attacks on healthcare facilities, with fewer than 14 percent fully operational in conflict zones. Around 19 million children have had their education disrupted. Sexual violence has been used systematically as a weapon of war. Nearly 34 million people are now in need of humanitarian assistance, and 19 million face acute food insecurity — with nearly 90 percent of displaced households reporting they cannot afford enough food. Humanitarian funding has covered only around 16 percent of needs, leaving relief organisations severely under-resourced.

International efforts to halt the war are gathering, though their prospects remain uncertain. On 15 April 2026, a Third International Sudan Conference is being held in Berlin, convened by the Quintet — a grouping comprising the African Union, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the League of Arab States, the European Union, and the United Nations. The Quintet has assembled around 40 civilian and political stakeholders in an effort to build momentum for a Sudanese-led peace process, while reaffirming its commitment to Sudan's sovereignty and territorial integrity and rejecting attempts to impose parallel governing structures. However, neither the army nor the RSF is directly participating, and the Sudanese government has expressed reservations about the composition of the attendees, raising questions about how much a civilian conference can achieve without the warring parties at the table.

For Sudan's people, the abstract language of diplomacy stands in sharp contrast to daily reality. Children born since April 2023 enter a world, in Renda's words, where "the hospital that should care for them is likely closed, the school that should educate them is probably not functioning, and the family that should support them has likely been displaced." Some 5.6 million children have been born into the war. What the Berlin conference represents, analysts suggest, is less a solution than a signal — that the international community has not yet looked away from a crisis that, without sustained attention and funding, risks becoming permanent.