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Ten Years, Two Wars: Sudan's Missing and Displaced Children (2016-2026)

25 August 2026 ChildTrace Research Desk 7 reads

Sudan's decade did not start in crisis but ended up producing the largest child displacement emergency on record. Between 2016 and early 2023, the country carried an unresolved but comparatively stable legacy of the Darfur conflict — millions still displaced from fighting that had raged since 2003, living in camps with no durable solution in sight. Then, on 15 April 2023, war broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). What followed is now the world's largest displacement crisis and, by UNICEF's own description, its largest child displacement crisis, layered on top of a famine, a collapsed education system, and a family-separation caseload the Red Cross Movement is struggling to keep pace with.

As with Sudan's neighbors, there is no single "missing children" register here. What exists is a set of figures kept by different organizations for different purposes — internal displacement surveys, refugee registrations, unaccompanied-and-separated-child (UASC) counts, and ICRC tracing caseloads — on different timelines and definitions. This report lays out the clearest of them with sources attached, spanning the earlier Darfur-era numbers through the current war, so every figure can be checked rather than taken on faith.

Sudan, at a glance — current planning figures

30M+People in need of humanitarian assistance
~10MInternally displaced, roughly half children
7M+Displaced children — largest child displacement crisis
15.2MChildren in need of humanitarian assistance (mid-2025)

Before the war: Darfur's unresolved displacement, 2016-2022

Sudan entered this ten-year window already carrying one of Africa's longest-running displacement crises. A November 2017 UN report found 2.6 million people still internally displaced by the Darfur conflict, even after a relative lull in fighting following ceasefires in place since June 2016. By early 2018, the Sudanese government's own count put national IDP numbers at roughly 2 million, with 1.76 million of those in Darfur specifically, alongside an estimated 386,000 returnees — figures that moved only slowly across these years because durable return was never achieved. This pre-war caseload matters for context: much of what the 2023 war displaced a second or third time was a population that had never actually resolved its displacement from the 2000s conflict.

April 2023: the RSF-SAF war and a new scale of displacement

The eruption of fighting between the SAF and RSF in Khartoum in April 2023 triggered displacement at a pace and scale that dwarfed the prior decade. Internal displacement rose 27 percent in 2024 alone, from 9 million to 11.5 million people, with children making up over 53 percent of those displaced. By December 2025, UNHCR and OCHA tracked roughly 10 million people displaced inside Sudan, alongside a cross-border outflow described by UNHCR as one of the largest refugee movements of the decade: over 2.7 million Sudanese have fled to neighboring countries — including more than 1.5 million to Egypt, over 770,000 (with a reported 938,127 recorded crossings) to Chad, and more than 1 million to South Sudan — while total cross-border movement of Sudanese and other refugees who had been hosted in Sudan exceeds 3.4 million. UNHCR recorded 952,700 additional refugee departures from Sudan in 2025 alone, underscoring that the crisis has not stabilized.

Children bearing the brunt

UNICEF's July 2025 mid-year situation report counted 15.256 million children in need of humanitarian assistance in Sudan and more than 7 million children displaced — the figure UNICEF uses to describe Sudan as the world's largest child displacement crisis. Earlier UN reporting, from March 2024, put the number of children exposed to a year of conflict-related brutality and rights violations at 24 million — essentially Sudan's entire child population. Verified grave violations against children rose sharply after April 2023: UN monitoring recorded 2,168 verified grave violations against 1,913 children between January 2022 and December 2023, including 277 verified cases of recruitment and use of children by armed forces or groups. In its 2024 annual report on children and armed conflict, the UN Secretary-General's office newly listed the RSF for recruitment and use, killing and maiming, rape and other sexual violence, and attacks on schools and hospitals, and separately verified 25 boys recruited and used by the RSF that year.

El Fasher and North Darfur: siege, famine, and camp displacement

North Darfur became the war's most acute flashpoint for children from 2024 into 2025. The siege of El Fasher, underway since May 2024, had by mid-2025 produced more than 1,100 verified grave violations in the city alone, including the killing and maiming of over 1,000 children, according to UNICEF's "500 days of siege" reporting. Attacks on the nearby Zamzam and Abu Shouk displacement camps in April 2025 killed at least 23 children and 9 aid workers by UNICEF's count, and displaced more than 400,000 people from Zamzam and surrounding localities — UNICEF separately reported 825,000 children trapped by the fighting around El Fasher and Zamzam. Five localities in North Darfur were assessed as experiencing famine in 2025, with a sixth at risk, and UNICEF projected 146,000 children would suffer severe acute malnutrition — the deadliest form — in North Darfur that year.

Family separation and the ICRC tracing caseload

The Red Cross Movement's Restoring Family Links network is the closest thing Sudan has to a formal missing-persons system, and its own figures show the caseload growing faster than it can close cases. The ICRC recorded over 7,700 requests to help locate a missing person in connection with the conflict in a recent reporting year — a 52 percent increase over the prior year — pushing its overall missing-persons caseload for Sudan past 11,000, up more than 40 percent year-on-year. In 2024, the ICRC and Red Cross/Red Crescent partners facilitated 755 family reunifications and gave definitive news of a loved one's fate to 5,083 families, while helping Sudanese refugees in South Sudan, Chad, Egypt, and Ethiopia make 400,000 phone calls to try to re-establish contact with relatives inside Sudan — a figure that rose to more than 560,000 calls facilitated in 2025, and over 80,000 more in just the first three months of 2026.

On the refugee side, UNHCR has recorded over 58,000 unaccompanied and separated children across the countries hosting Sudanese refugees, cautioning the true number is likely higher given continued population movement and weak identification systems at some borders. In Egypt alone, more than 4,300 unaccompanied and separated Sudanese children have registered with UNHCR since April 2023. Inside Sudan itself, UNHCR reported over 200 unaccompanied children registered through its own programs, most successfully reunited with family, alongside more than 700 individuals referred for specialized protection assistance, including survivors of sexual and gender-based violence.

Education collapse: a generation losing school access

Sudan's war has produced what UNICEF and Save the Children describe as the world's largest education crisis. By the 2025-2026 school year, an estimated 13 million of Sudan's 17 million school-age children were out of school — roughly 7 million enrolled but unable to attend because of conflict or displacement, and about 6 million never enrolled at all. Around half of school buildings nationwide were no longer functioning, with some assessments putting 54-55 percent of schools closed in 2025. One estimate found only 13 percent of school-age children were enrolled or regularly attending. Programs launched in 2025 and 2026 — including a UNICEF/Education Above All initiative and the UNICEF-Save the Children "BRIDGES" program — aimed to restore learning for roughly 158,000 and 328,000 children respectively, figures that illustrate both the response scale and how small it is relative to the 13-million-child gap.

Reading these numbers responsibly

These figures are not a missing-persons register. They are drawn from displacement tracking, refugee registration, education-access surveys, grave-violations monitoring, and ICRC tracing statistics — each collected for a different purpose, on a different schedule, using different definitions of "displaced," "separated," or "missing." They should not be summed or treated as a single running total, and none of them constitutes a real-time, case-by-case count of children currently missing in Sudan. A platform like ChildTrace exists precisely because no unified register of that kind currently exists at national or regional scale.

References

Compiled from publicly available UN, ICRC/Red Cross Movement, and humanitarian-cluster reporting current as of August 2026. Figures come from different reporting periods, agencies, and methodologies and are not directly additive. This report is independent research and is not itself a missing-persons record — to report a missing child connected to Sudan, use the ChildTrace reporting tool.

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