Michel-Olivier Lacharité

Head of Emergency operations

At the end of September, MSF medical teams were forced to stop outpatient treatment for malnourished children in Zamzam displacement camp in North Darfur, Sudan.

In practice, we are talking about 5,000 children who had to be sent home. They can no longer be treated in our outpatient clinics, their condition will deteriorate, and they are inevitably at risk of dying.



Only MSF's 80-bed hospital keeps functioning in the camp to treat children facing the greatest risk of dying.

Doctors Without Borders has been sounding the alarm since January following an assessment which revealed that 30% of the children screened were malnourished, and the surveys we did in April and August confirmed this alarming situation.



Today our teams had to stop part of their work, as the fighting surrounding the camp is blocking the arrival of supplies.



So there is an urgent need to restart those activities and to do so we need to set up a massive supply chain to ship dozens or even hundreds of trucks with humanitarian supplies into Zamzam camp.



In August, the IPC*, a leading global organisation in food security crisis analysis, concluded that a famine was underway in Zamzam camp.



*Integrated Food Security Phase Classification.



Since then, we’ve seen only few trucks arriving in Zamzam… Some nutritional supplies, some medicines, but it’s clearly far from enough.



With an estimated population of 450,000 people, we need at least 2,000 tons of emergency food rations, meaning around 100 trucks.



The parties to the conflict recognise the seriousness of the situation and are starting to let trucks arrive. However, these quantities are insufficient.



MSF is calling on the various stakeholders, the governments, the allies of the warring parties, the Rapid Support Forces, the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Joint Forces, to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid to the camp.