Amid what the United Nations has called the “worst flooding in decades,” humanitarians in Sudan fear that there is not enough funding to address the damages from floods that are only getting worse.
Sudanese officials declared on Sept. 5 a three-month state of emergency after flooding caused by unusually heavy seasonal rain killed roughly 100 people and injured nearly 50 as more than 100,000 homes collapsed. At the time, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said that the floods had knocked out or contaminated about 2,000 sources of clean water.
As of Thursday, the death toll had surpassed 120, and the OCHA reported that “nearly 830,000 people have had their houses destroyed or damaged.” More than half of those displaced were children.
The number of people affected by Sudan’s worst flooding of the last decades continues to increase.
Nearly 830,000 people have had their houses destroyed or damaged & over 120 died, according to the Government.
Funding to respond is extremely low.
More: https://t.co/cPNL4YdofA pic.twitter.com/6xXQBwzy8Q
— UN OCHA Sudan (@UNOCHA_Sudan) September 24, 2020
“We need the government to come take care of the water in the houses because the water is now mixed with sewage water from the trees that collapsed,” Farajalla Mohammed, a resident of a flooded area, told Al Jazeera.
September typically falls in the middle of a heavy rainy season in Sudan that runs from June to October. While regions along the Nile are used to seasonal flooding, Sudanese officials stated that the stretch of the Nile along Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, has experienced the highest water levels since records were first kept more than a century ago.
OCHA officials are expecting more rainfall for the region in the days to come.
OCHA reports that roughly 9.6 million people in Sudan are now “severely food-insecure” as floods compound many issues Sudan has faced recently and warns that “funding to respond is extremely low.” Of the OCHA’s required budget of $1.6 billion to address issues ranging from education and nutrition to the coronavirus and flood relief, OCHA has raised $755.7 million. Some of those funds have gone toward addressing a 10% increase in malaria cases from the previous year, likely a consequence of the increased flooding and number of displaced individuals.
