Stretched thin, Sudan’s community kitchens feed an ever-growing population as famine deepens

Communal kitchens assist hundreds of thousands in Sudan’s embattled capital, Khartoum. They provide regular meals and social and emotional support amid a deepening famine that international aid groups are failing to tackle.

Run by neighborhood-based mutual aid groups called emergency response rooms, the kitchens are struggling with crippling funding gaps, security threats, and communications and electricity blackouts, volunteers told The New Humanitarian.

The wide-ranging challenges mean many kitchens only offer one meal per day. At the same time, some emergency response rooms have cut back to a single meal per week or have temporarily closed down even while their communities remain in desperate need.

“The service we gain from the kitchen is life-saving… but the food amount is not enough for everyone. Circumstances are very bad here,” said Nisreen*, a woman from Umbada locality in Omdurman, a major city in the Greater Khartoum area. She said the Umbada kitchen can only offer one meal per week, usually beans or lentils. Still, people depend on that small amount, and a further reduction would be a “disaster”, she added.

Sudan’s war began in April 2023 and pitted the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces against the regular army. It has produced the world’s largest displacement crisis, uprooting nearly 10 million people, and the...

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