SUDAN - Fatima Omas Abdullah wakes up every morning with aches and pains from sleeping on bare ground for almost two years. She did not expect Sudan’s civil war to displace her for so long into neighbouring Chad.
“There is nothing here,” she said, crying and shaking the straw door of her makeshift home. Since April 2023, she has been in the Adre transit camp a few hundred metres from the Sudanese border, along with almost a quarter-million others fleeing the fighting.
Now the US-backed aid system that kept hundreds of thousands like Abdullah alive on the edge of one of the world’s most devastating wars is fraying. Under the Trump administration, key foreign aid has been slashed and funding withdrawn from United Nations programmes that feed, treat and shelter refugees.
In 2024, the US contributed $39.3 million to the emergency response in Chad. So far this year, it has contributed about $6.8 million, the UN says. Overall, only 13 per cent of the requested money to support refugees in Chad this year has come in from all donors, according to UN data. (Jamaica Gleaner)
