The World Food Programme's funding for Sudan has fallen from $645 million in 2025 to $206 million so far in 2026, a decline of roughly 68 percent with three and a half months of the year still remaining, according to Carl Skau, the agency's acting Executive Director, speaking to Reuters from the Darfur region on September 14. Skau said WFP now faces a gap of just under $300 million to sustain its current operations against a hunger crisis that affects nearly 20 million people across Sudan.
The scale of the mismatch is stark. WFP has narrowed its assistance to the 5 million people it identifies as most vulnerable, and has managed to reach roughly 4 million of them. That leaves an estimated 15 to 16 million hungry people entirely outside WFP's reach, not because they cannot be found, but, Skau said, because the money to feed them does not exist.
The paradox Skau described
For most of Sudan's three-year civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the central humanitarian obstacle was physical access. Frontlines, sieges and active combat kept aid convoys out of contested territory, a dynamic Crisis.Zone has documented in reporting on drone strikes hitting civilian infrastructure near the Chad border, where Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) treated more than 20 people injured in an attack on a fuel market.
Skau's account inverts that framing. "We have presence that we are not fully utilising because of the lack of funding," he told Reuters. The infrastructure, the field staff and, in some areas, the physical corridors exist. What is missing is the resource base to convert that presence into food reaching people. In El Obeid, where roughly one million people have been displaced since April 2023, WFP says it can now only assist those who arrived in the past several months. In West Kordofan, Sudan Tribune has reported that six localities, particularly those under RSF control, face sharply worsening hunger amid looting and destroyed livelihoods.
Observers are reading: how IOM's pipeline depletion and MSF's clinic closures compound WFP's funding gap into a system-wide collapse risk.
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What the access gains cannot fix
Sudan's civil war has also drawn in regional actors, a dynamic Crisis.Zone examined when Khartoum formally accused Ethiopia of allowing drones to launch from its territory against Sudanese targets. That regionalisation raises the stakes of any humanitarian collapse, since instability in Sudan risks not remaining contained within its borders.
On the ground, the Sudanese army announced on September 14 that it had broken the RSF's siege of Dilling, ending a blockade of more than 18 months. In ordinary circumstances, breaking a siege of that length would open a new corridor for aid delivery. Under current conditions, the question is not whether the corridor exists, but whether anyone has the funding to use it.
That is the structural core of Skau's warning. Humanitarian organisations spent years fighting for the access that Sudan's frontlines denied them. In parts of the country, they have it now. What they lack is the money to turn presence into food, medicine and shelter for the roughly 16 million people currently outside the reach of the world's largest hunger response. "We simply can't turn our back on the people of Sudan," Skau said. Whether donor capitals share that position will be measured not in statements, but in the next disbursement.
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