MSF says aid cuts have closed Sudan clinics as UN funding sits at 41 percent
Forty-five centres in Central Darfur lost support in May. Admissions at MSF sites in Zalingei and Rokero rose 22.5 percent from January to April. Muhammad Ibrahim told donors gathering for the UN General Assembly that war is raising need while money shrinks.
Port Sudan2 min read
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Médecins Sans Frontières said on 8 September that Sudan’s health system is losing clinics faster than remaining hospitals can absorb the patients. The charity timed the warning for governments gathering at the United Nations General Assembly. Its head of mission in Sudan, Muhammad Ibrahim, put the problem in one sentence: “War is driving Sudan’s needs; funding cuts are shrinking the response.”
MSF’s own work in Sudan is paid from private donations. The collapse it describes is in the network around it. After Washington shut USAID in 2025, many of that agency’s Sudan grants ended in June 2026. European institutional budgets fell in the same period. Global humanitarian spending is down 35.8 percent from a year earlier, the charity said. The UN response plan for Sudan, priced at $2.87 billion, is 41 percent funded. About 37 percent of the country’s health facilities are out of service.
The sharpest local number is from Central Darfur. In May, 45 general healthcare centres there stopped receiving support because the organisation that supplied them ran out of money. Between January and April, admissions at MSF-supported facilities in Zalingei and Rokero rose 22.5 percent against the same months in 2025. Patients who used to walk to a neighbourhood clinic now travel further, through areas still contested by the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, and arrive sicker.
Fabrizio Locuratolo, who works on humanitarian affairs at an MSF hospital in Um Rakuba in Gedaref state, said the cuts are not limited to medicine. “Food rations are shrinking and protection programmes are being dismantled, pulling away the last safety nets and leaving refugees completely exposed,” he said. About 19.5 million people in Sudan faced crisis levels of hunger earlier this year. More than 11 million have been displaced since the war began in April 2023.
A June letter from the Sudan Health Cluster, written before the USAID grants lapsed, had already mapped the risk. Partners then counted 335 facilities across 13 states that depended on Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance money due to stop on 30 June. The projected list included 126 primary centres suspended and 104 running at reduced capacity, seven hospitals suspended and 18 reduced, and 20 mobile clinics stopped with 12 more cut back. East Darfur had 48 facilities on that list, Central Darfur 45, West Darfur 38, South Darfur 37, Khartoum 31, Blue Nile 24 and North Darfur 21. An estimated 3.35 million people sat behind those numbers, including about 1.5 million displaced people in camps.
MSF asked governments in New York for stopgap cash so clinics already identified can stay open through the autumn. It did not claim that a single appropriation would rebuild the system. The request is narrower: keep the remaining frontline rooms staffed and stocked so that the hospitals still standing are not the only door left.
The United States remains, even after USAID’s closure, the largest donor to Sudan through other channels, including money routed to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. That fact does not reopen a health centre in Zalingei whose implementing partner lost its grant in May. The war sets the casualty list. The budget line decides how far a wounded or malnourished patient has to walk.
