Sudan's healthcare system on brink of collapse after cuts, medical charity warns

Sudan's healthcare system on brink of collapse after cuts, medical charity warns

Hospitals and healthcare facilities are closing down because of a lack of funding

Sudan's fragile health system is close to collapse after global funding cuts have forced healthcare facilities to shut across the country, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has warned.

The medical charity said dozens of organisations could not secure replacement funding after the US - the largest donor to Sudan - shut USAID, its foreign aid agency, last year.

MSF called on world leaders meeting at the UN General Assembly in New York to act.

The war that broke out in April 2023 between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has produced one of the world's worst humanitarian crises, with more than 33 million people in need of medical help.

MSF said that although the US remained the biggest donor to Sudan, existing grants for many USAID-funded organisations expired in June - while European governments were also cutting back international aid.

The Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said global international aid dropped by 21.3% in 2025 compared with the previous year.

"War is driving Sudan's needs; funding cuts are shrinking the response," said Muhammad Ibrahim, the head of charity in Sudan.

"MSF's work in Sudan is privately funded. But when funding disappears from other health services, clinics close, patients have fewer places to go, and pressure shifts to the facilities that remain, including ours."

As a result, patients often have to make long and dangerous journeys to receive treatment.

"After a longer and more expensive journey, patients often arrive in a much more serious condition, and the hospital may already be full," said Sebastián Traficante, MSF's emergency co-ordinator in the western region of Darfur, where much of the fighting over the past three years has taken place.

From January to April 2026, MSF recorded a 22.5% rise in admissions at facilities it supports in central Darfur compared with the same period last year.

In May alone, 45 healthcare centres in the area stopped receiving funding, it said.

MSF said the shutdown of frontline services was placing other hospitals under severe pressure, as they lost the ability to operate and medicines ran out.

It cited Gedaref state's Tanedba camp, home to 18,400 people who have fled their homes, as an example. Its maternity and surgical wards have shut after a humanitarian organisation departed in June.

MSF is now operating an emergency room there, but pregnant women who need surgery to give birth must travel three hours to the nearest city.

In Um Rakuba camp - also in Gedaref - the number of aid agencies working there has fallen from 35 in 2021 to fewer than 10.

The charity said the camp currently shelters about 17,000 people, most of them women and children.

"If support does not increase, more patients will face longer journeys, fewer treatment options and greater risk of arriving too late for care," MSF's UK humanitarian representative Liz Harding said.

At the same time as the health system was struggling with funding, attacks on healthcare workers were continuing, MSF said.

In 2025, Sudan recorded 1,620 people killed in attacks on medical facilities - a figure the charity said represented 82% of all global deaths from attacks on healthcare worldwide.

The UN says more than 19.5 million people are also facing "crisis levels" of food insecurity and more than five million are dealing with "emergency levels of hunger".

The fighting shows no sign of easing - despite the expected arrival of international diplomats in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, for consultations intended to end the civil war.

Reports from North Kordofan state on Tuesday said at least 11 people were killed in a drone strike on the army-held town of Umm Ruwaba. Medical sources said the projectile hit a crowded courtyard in a court complex.