Sudan's civil war enters its fourth year with 14 million displaced — 9 million internally and 4.4 million across borders — and 33.7 million people in humanitarian need in 2026. [1] Funding stands at 8 percent of the UN's $4.16 billion response plan. UNHCR has received 16 percent of the $2.8 billion required for assistance inside Sudan and 8 percent of the $1.6 billion regional refugee response. [2] One in four Sudanese is now displaced. The May 5 paper recorded the Year 4 totals and the 8 percent funding gap. Today's register is what the parallel-government formalization is doing to the donor architecture.
The formalization keeps moving. The Rapid Support Forces' Government of Peace and Unity, sworn in at Nyala in August 2025 with Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo as president of a fifteen-member Presidential Council and Mohamed Hassan al-Taishi as prime minister, is now eight months operational. [3] The army-led civilian government under Prime Minister Kamil Idris returned officially to Khartoum in January 2026 after operating from Port Sudan since August 2023. October 2025 brought the RSF capture of El Fasher in North Darfur; December's intense fighting extended to Kordofan. The map remains divided. The two governments — one army-aligned, one paramilitary-led — both produce humanitarian-access requests. Neither receives the other's recognition.
The donor mechanism does not have a protocol for this. The UN appeal is structured around a single Sudanese state. The eight-percent funding number is computed against a $4.16 billion target with no allocation rule for which authority disburses where. Egypt and Saudi Arabia recognize Burhan's army. The African Union does not. The UAE faces credible accusations from UN experts and U.S. lawmakers of arming the RSF. Berlin's April 15 conference produced approximately $1 billion in pledges against a $3 billion target. Pledge-to-disbursement gaps in 2024 and 2025 ran 30 to 40 percent. The functioning humanitarian flow inside Sudan increasingly runs through diaspora mutual-aid and community kitchens — a parallel system to match the parallel government.
Year 4's funding number is a procedural artifact of an architecture that has no entry for two governments. The architecture is what is unfunded.
-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin