Three Years of conflict in Sudan, Statement by UNFPA Executive Director Diene Keita

Today marks three years of conflict in Sudan. Three years on, women and girls in Sudan continue to pay an unbearable price.

Nearly 34 million people now require humanitarian aid, making it the largest single crisis in the world. Among them are more than 7 million women of reproductive age and around 1 million pregnant women, the vast majority of whom cannot access the care that could save their lives and the lives of their newborns.

From the very beginning, the conflict has been marked by horrific violence against women and girls, including sexual violence, abductions, forced marriage and countless other abuses. Many men and boys have been killed or forcibly disappeared, leaving millions of women as head of their household, struggling to survive and make ends meet.

Sudan's health system has been shattered by the conflict, with deadly attacks on health facilities, staff and patients leading to displacement of health workers; this has been compounded by critical shortages of medical supplies and funding. As a result, most health facilities across the country are closed or barely functioning. For women and girls in the hardest-hit areas, life-saving reproductive and maternal health care is either days away or completely out of reach.

Displaced women and girls often walk for weeks in search of safety, only to find overcrowded camps with few basic services, owing to critical funding shortages. Women struggle to access the basics for health and survival, and survivors of gender-based violence struggle to reach safe spaces and access the medical and psychosocial support they urgently need.

UNFPA is delivering critical health and protection services wherever it can, deploying mobile health teams, providing emergency obstetric care and establishing safe spaces for women and girls. At the same time, funding gaps are severely limiting our ability to meet the scale of need in displacement sites and in the towns and villages to which women and girls are beginning to return. Without a significant increase in resources, hundreds of thousands of women will go without vital care and services.

UNFPA calls for rapid, unhindered humanitarian access to all those in need across Sudan and respect for international humanitarian law. We echo the Secretary-General's call for a lasting ceasefire and an inclusive political process towards peace. The women and girls of Sudan deserve nothing less.