Every so often, someone asks me, “What’s happening in Sudan? Is the war still going on?” The answer is yes. More than three years on, the war is still ongoing, with no clear end in sight. For Sudanese people, both in Sudan and across the world, this is not an old headline or a crisis that has passed. It is something that continues to shape our lives every single day.
The war has changed the course of so many lives in ways that will be felt for generations to come. Some of those consequences are visible in the images and headlines we see. Others are quieter, playing out in homes, workplaces and families across the world. I see its impact in one shape or another among Sudanese people all around me.
I think about the people who have left Sudan and are unable to find work in the countries where they now live, despite their qualifications and years of experience. The families seeking asylum, and those whose applications have been rejected, left trying to work out where else they can go and how they can rebuild their lives. There are children whose education has been interrupted and university students who have lost years of study, some told they must start their degrees again because they cannot obtain proof of what they had already completed.
I think about the men who were preparing for marriage, only to lose their savings overnight and find themselves unable to imagine when they might be able to afford it again. The elderly people who lost the pensions and savings they were relying on for retirement. The people who put years of hard-earned money into homes and properties they can no longer access, unsure what remains of everything they worked for. And the women who had built up their savings in gold over many years, only to flee without it and later learn that their homes had been looted and their safes broken into.
And I think about the elderly people we lost in those early days, and the profound sadness and heartbreak they experienced before they passed away—having been forced from homes they had spent a lifetime building, with so much of what was familiar and precious to them suddenly taken away.
Alongside these losses are the responsibilities and separations that have reshaped family life. There are breadwinners struggling to make ends meet, and Sudanese people already working abroad who became responsible almost overnight for sending money and supporting entire families in Sudan and elsewhere. People have opened their homes and taken on responsibility for relatives who had nowhere else to turn. Families have become scattered across different countries, relying on WhatsApp video calls to stay connected, share milestones and watch children grow.
These are just some of the consequences of a war that is still being fought. The scale of the humanitarian crisis is staggering: in 2026, an estimated 33.7 million people in Sudan need humanitarian assistance, according to UNICEF. As of October, UNHCR reported that more than 11 million people had been forcibly displaced in connection with the crisis, both within Sudan and across its borders.
Around 19.5 million people are facing high levels of acute food insecurity, including five million experiencing emergency levels. In October, the World Health Organization warned of a growing risk of famine across parts of Darfur and Kordofan. Behind each of those figures is a person, a family and a life that has been disrupted. There are people grieving loved ones, worrying about relatives they cannot reach, trying to find safety, and wondering how they will provide for their children.
There are also Sudanese people who have found new opportunities and achieved things they might never have imagined. Their resilience and perseverance deserve to be recognised and celebrated. But rebuilding a life and grieving the one you lost can happen at the same time. Success does not erase the loss, or the circumstances that made starting again necessary.
Having grown up in Sudan and the wider region, I was not unfamiliar with the reality or consequences of war. Conflict, displacement and the experiences of people forced to leave their homes were not distant concepts to me. But being in Sudan when this war began, and seeing its consequences unfold in my own life and in the lives of the people around me, has made that reality deeply personal in a different way.
So the next time someone asks me, “Is the war in Sudan still going on?”, the answer is yes. It is still being fought. People are still being killed and displaced. Families are still searching for safety, still trying to stay connected, and still working out how to rebuild their lives. And even for those of us living outside Sudan, its consequences are already part of our everyday lives: in the people we worry about, the responsibilities we carry and the futures we are trying to piece together.
For the world, Sudan may sometimes feel like an old headline. For us, it is still home, still our families, and still our reality.
