Food Security

Digital cash transfers can be delivered even in active conflict settings like Sudan and can significantly protect vulnerable households—especially in the most insecure areas—from worsening food insecurity, though their impacts vary by context and household characteristics.While the recent surge in armed conflicts and natural disasters continues to increase demand for humanitarian services, humanitarian organizations face an increasing funding gap to meet this demand.

Families in crisis are often treated as a single unit, but new research from Sudan shows that husbands and wives often have very different ideas about what aid they need. To truly tackle hunger, it is important to look at who is actually making the decisions inside the home.

Sudan’s humanitarian emergency is worsening amid the country’s ongoing internal conflict, with devastating impacts on food security. The latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) analysis (November 3, 2025) shows that nearly half the population continues to confront high levels of acute food insecurity. Famine (IPC Phase 5) has been confirmed in the cities of El Fasher (North Darfur state) and Kadugli (South Kordofan state), with at least 20 additional localities at risk of famine if violence escalates or humanitarian access continues to be blocked.

The past forty years have brought both progress and new challenges for African agriculture. While overall per capita food supplies have become more stable and agricultural productivity has improved, the region’s dependence on food imports has increased, from 39 percent between 1985-2000 to 46.6 percent between 2016-2023. In addition, the food security, livelihoods, and overall well-being of wide swathes of Africa’s population remain more vulnerable than ever before to the negative impacts of climate change, political instability and conflict, and economic shocks.

The world faced a stark inflection point in 2024, as the continued rise in the number of people facing crisis-to-catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity meets sharp reductions in funding for humanitarian assistance. The 2025 Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC), released today, reports that 295.3 million people across 53 countries/territories faced acute food insecurity in 2024. This represents a tripling of the number of people facing acute hunger since 2016 and a doubling since 2020 (Figure 1).

Figure 1