There has been a sharp increase in the number of people fleeing from Sudan to Chad to escape fighting and dire conditions, and aid funding is failing to keep up with needs, the United Nations refugee agency said on Friday.
More than 400 people a day have been crossing into eastern Chad over the past week, a 20-fold increase from the numbers seen in recent months, UNHCR said.
They were fleeing Sudan’s Darfur, Kordofan and Blue Nile regions — which have all been hit by clashes between Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in a more than three-year-old civil war.
There were “people who tell us that they flee the conflict, they flee the aerial bombardments, they flee the drone attacks,” Mamadou Dian Balde, UN Regional Refugee Co-ordinator for the Sudan Situation, told reporters in Geneva via video link from Nairobi.
Only 18 per cent of the $1.6 billion funding it needed this year had come in, UNHCR said.
“It means less food. It means less capacity for people to be relocated to safer areas. It means less capacity to shelter themselves,” Dian Balde said.
