Sudan’s Civil War - The Limits of Humanitarian Aid
It is arguably the world's biggest humanitarian crisis - yet the civil war in Sudan has received little attention from the international community. The Sudanese civil war continues to escalate: Some 26 million people are starving. People here are dependent on humanitarian aid.
But Europeans have cut aid payments, and, following the dismantling of the American aid program USAID, emergency aid workers in Sudan find themselves slowly running out of funds. Working for the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), Sani Akilou is responsible for both the water supply and hygiene in the refugee camps in Chad. But he lacks money for even the most basic things.
As a result, drinking water is a brown broth, and in some cases there are no toilets for thousands of people. Sani tries to get a sooty generator repaired to produce electricity for the pumps supplying water to 40,000 refugees. Meanwhile, the few doctors in the camps are fighting for the lives of the first people who have contracted cholera. If the disease continues to spread through contaminated water, thousands of people are at risk of death.
Sani's colleague Charlotte Lepiniec is responsible for education at the UNHCR. Reading, writing, arithmetic - these things seem almost irrelevant when there’s not enough money to fight hunger, disease, and death. But if half a million children stop learning long-term poverty will become entrenched here. Education is one of the keys to overcoming the crisis. But everything is in short supply: blackboards, pens, books, chairs, tables. Sometimes, there are over 100 pupils in a class. Teachers haven’t been paid for four months. Nevertheless, they continue to teach - even though they’re going hungry like everyone else. Food rations from the UN World Food Programme have already been drastically reduced.
The budget for global emergency aid administered by the German Foreign Ministry has also recently been cut by more than half, to around one billion euros. The film is a journey into a little-noticed region of the world where the consequences of reduced emergency aid are dramatic. It shows how dedicated aid workers try to save lives, despite having very little money to do so.