The World’s Refugee Relief Is Utterly Broken (2024)

ADRÉ, Chad—Abdussalam Mustapha and his friends used to play soccer for hours after school in El Geneina, a city in the West Darfur region of Sudan. But the 10-year-old can’t play anymore.

In April 2023, war came to Sudan. The Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary wing of Sudan’s army, allied with other militia groups to perpetrate an ethnic cleansing campaign against non-Arab populations in and around El Geneina. Abdussalam and his entire extended family were forced to flee their homes on foot late at night, carrying only what they could hold in their hands.

On the way, the group was attacked. Abdussalam clutched the hand of his 5-year-old brother and ran. Suddenly, he felt a searing pain, and blood began pouring out of a gunshot wound in his stomach. The little fingers gripping his hand went slack. His brother had been shot in the head and died instantly. Now he was seated next to his mother on the floor of the family’s tented shelter in a refugee settlement in Chad.

Nearly 2 million Sudanese people have escaped to neighboring countries since the war started, and approximately 600,000 of them have fled to Chad. About 88 percent of the refugees are women and children. Some new arrivals have physical wounds. Almost all have emotional scars. After they cross the border, they are dependent on United Nations agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to provide water, food, shelter, medical care, and basic supplies, such as soap, blankets, and buckets.

Despite efforts to raise money to respond to the crisis, the international community is falling far short of fundraising goals. On April 15, one year after the start of the war, world leaders and humanitarians met in Paris for an event intended to raise funds to support all U.N. agencies and aid organizations involved in the Sudan conflict response. $2.7 billion would go toward helping people in Sudan and an additional $1.4 billion would go toward supporting five refugee-hosting neighbors: South Sudan, Ethiopia, Egypt, the Central African Republic, and Chad. Of the total $4.1 billion required, only $2 billion was committed in Paris, an amount that was “really worrying” when considering that the amount of money that actually comes in is always less than what is committed at a pledging event, said Harpinder Collacott, executive director of Mercy Corps Europe.

Around the world, the need for humanitarian funding is outstripping the money that can be raised. Experts say that the problem is the funding model itself. A small handful of donor countries determine who and what gets the funding, which means that funding is based on the generosity of governments with political agendas. The system is voluntary, and governments sometimes make commitments that they don’t follow through on. Some crises captivate public attention more than others, and are therefore better funded, experts say. Others, like protracted conflicts in African countries, receive scant media attention and far less funding.

“I always go back to the [idea of the] tin can. Government and the UN, on behalf of the people in crisis, have to ask every single time for money,” said Michelle Strucke, director of the humanitarian agenda at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington-based think tank. In terms of which crises get funding, “it almost seems whimsical from the outside.” The results are anything but.

The perpetrators murdered 38 members of Abdussalam’s family that night. “We were all running for our lives,” 30-year-old Mounira Oumar Mahamat Abdallah, Abdussalam’s mother, said tearfully. “Abdussalam was also shot. And was found by other people.” Those people brought Abdussalam to his mother. She hoisted him onto her back and started walking west. Abdussalam was delirious, drifting in and out of consciousness. The following day, they reached Adré, the Chadian border town that has become the busiest crossing point for refugees fleeing Darfur.

Abdussalam required multiple surgeries, so the family stayed in Adré while Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), a nongovernmental organization that provides medical care in crises, operated on him six times. MSF has established a large clinic in the Adré refugee settlement, providing everything from medical checkups and vaccinations to mental health counseling for 300 to 500 refugees per day. It has also embedded in the Chadian government hospital in Adré, where surgeons can perform lifesaving surgery on patients like Abdussalam.

MSF’s medical and humanitarian programs in eastern Chad had expenses of approximately $22 million in 2023 and have a planned budget of about $41.5 million in 2024. To fill the gap left by other underfunded U.N. agencies and NGOs, MSF has rapidly deployed across the region, digging latrines, drilling boreholes, and serving hundreds of thousands of Sudanese as well as local Chadians. “We’ve responded massively in eastern Chad because the needs are acute, but we’re overstretched and carrying a heavier load than we should within the humanitarian aid sector,” said Avril Benoît, executive director of MSF USA.

At MSF’s pediatric ward in the hospital, dozens of emaciated babies and toddlers receive treatment for severe acute malnutrition, which affects brain development and increases mortality in children under five years. Despite the best efforts of doctors and nurses, three to four of these children die each week from malnutrition, said Sachin Desai, an MSF pediatrician.

Malnutrition has become one of the top concerns of humanitarians working in Chad. Before the war, Sudan was considered the “breadbasket” of Africa: Farming accounted for 60 percent of total national exports in 2022. But scorching, dry weather combined with missed harvests due to conflict means there is almost no food available in parts of Sudan today. Nearly 18 million Sudanese are facing acute hunger, and more than 5 million are experiencing emergency hunger levels in the worst conflict-affected areas, the World Food Program (WFP) says.

Today, both hunger and violence are driving migration. Once refugees reach Chad, they are registered and given WFP food ration cards. WFP organizes massive monthly food distributions, serving between 15,000 to 20,000 people per day. The April distribution was delayed by several weeks due to lack of funding, which also affected the quantity of the food the refugees received. They should get 2,100 calories per refugee per day, but in April, they got only 1,700 calories.

On a scorching April morning, thousands of women wearing colorful laffayas, traditional Sudanese dresses, sit patiently in long lines to receive their food rations. Maryam Ibrahim Saif Addine, stands out in a tattered black laffaya. The 35-year-old lost her husband to violence in Sudan and depends on rations to feed her seven children. Addine carefully measures out her portion of oil, beans, soap, salt, and cereals, which she will grind into flour to make porridge.

“I came here to wait for food early in the morning. I didn’t even take tea,” Addine said. “It’s still not enough. Sometimes, we have to sell our food to get some money and buy other things.”

Hundreds of thousands of refugees are now camped out in Adré along the border with Sudan. The newest arrivals have no shelter and sleep beneath scarfs propped up with sticks. They are exposed to the harsh desert elements, and lack food, water, medical care, and basic goods. With the rainy season fast approaching, aid workers say the conditions are ripe for a compounded humanitarian disaster. The rains will destroy the flimsy shelters, wash out the roads, and bring malarial mosquitoes, cholera, and other diseases. Getting refugees into semi-permanent shelters as quickly as possible is crucial to ensuring their safety.

Between July and December 2023, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) relocated approximately 150,000 refugees from Adré to newly established settlements inland from the border.

“Finally, I was seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Adré was starting to look again like a normal place,” said Laura Lo Castro, UNHCR’s Chad country director. Then, new waves of refugees began fleeing fresh outbreaks of violence. “Today, it looks the same as it did last July,” she said.

Today, another 170,000 refugees in Adré are waiting to be relocated. UNHCR has moved only 30,000 refugees in 2024 because of budget constraints. The agency wants to open a new site and relocate another 50,000 refugees, but it would cost approximately $17 million to build the necessary housing, water and sanitation infrastructure, and schools. “To be completely honest with you, I have no money to do that,” Lo Castro said.

Lo Castro is familiar with humanitarian emergencies. She helped refugees fleeing the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. Still, Lo Castro said the refugee crisis in Chad is one of the worst-funded emergencies she has ever worked on. The 2024 Sudan refugee response plan is only 8 percent funded. For Chad alone, $630 million is needed, but its part is only 6 percent funded. These numbers are in line with other major crises in the region: the Democratic Republic of Congo is also 8 percent funded, South Sudan is only 5 percent funded.

The problem is the international humanitarian funding model itself, which emerged from the ashes of World War II, when powerful nations came together to establish rules and institutions to regulate the global monetary system. The model, which was intended to help rebuild Europe, gave concentrated power to key stakeholder countries. Today, most international humanitarian responses are bankrolled by these influential top donors, including the United States, the European Union, and the United Kingdom.

“When you’ve got bilateral donors funding international humanitarian response, it’s always dependent on the political priorities of the donors on which one they will give to rather than others,” Collacott of Mercy Corps said.

The money often goes to the conflicts that suck up the most media attention. “When it bleeds it leads,” Strucke of CSIS explained. “If it’s a really high-profile conflict, or it’s a sudden onset disaster, like a catastrophic hurricane or earthquake situation, those get a lot of immediate attention, and that means the response plans are typically better funded.”

Inflation, rising costs, an increase in climate related disasters, and an increase in protracted conflicts around the world have created greater demand for humanitarian funding than ever before. The money feels less in part because of inflation and also because leading humanitarian donors are changing how they are using their dollars for assistance. Strucke said that some countries are repurposing parts of their budget that they would have used for development assistance towards border security instead. “And they think of it all as migration, but they’re actually doing a very dramatic shift in where the money is going,” Strucke said.

Diversification is key to improving the model, Collacott said. Receiving funding from more emerging market governments, such as India and Indonesia, private sector companies, and international NGOs could help combat the issue of not enough funding being concentrated in the hands of a few agenda setting countries. Funding must also be proactive, rather than reactive.

“We know every year there are going to be at least three new major global crises that we’re going to be fundraising for,” Collacott said. “We don’t want to be seeking funding after the crisis hits, but already have funding secured.”

Collacott floats the idea of a new humanitarian funding model based on three principles: all contribute, all benefit, all decide. “Until you make the connection that something happening miles away has a knock-on effect on your shores, people won’t see that this is a global conflict,” she said. “Crisis financing needs to be built on global public good, or we’re going to see the world destabilizing.”

This reporting was supported by a grant from the International Women’s Media Foundation. Aboubakar Nour and Zoe Flood contributed reporting.

Correction, May 29, 2024: A previous version of this article misspelled Laura Lo Castro’s name. It has been fixed.