‘We survive together’: The communal kitchens fighting famine in Khartoum

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

Run by neighbourhood-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, while 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 which 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 that is part of the Greater Khartoum area.

Read the rest at The New Humanitarian