Every year, Ahmad Yahya repairs the walls of his home in eastern Chad after the rainy season. Built from sand-coloured bricks, the house has sheltered his family for years. Yet it stands in a place he never expected to call home for so long. Ahmad was just nine when he fled the violence of Sudan's Darfur region in 2003, leaving behind much of his family and the childhood he had known. Twenty-three years later, he is raising two sons in the same refugee camp where he once sought safety. The walls have been repaired year after year, but the uncertainty surrounding his family's future has never disappeared.
Ahmad's experience, documented in a Reuters investigation published on October 26, reflects a humanitarian crisis that has outlasted the world's attention. Since a new civil war erupted in Sudan in April 2023, approximately 974,000 people have fled across the border into Chad, bringing the country's Sudanese refugee population to around 1.4 million. Some arrived only recently; others, like Ahmad, have spent most of their lives in exile. What began as an emergency response to war has gradually become a permanent reality for families who still have no clear path towards lasting security.
For Ahmad, leaving the camp once seemed possible. In 2018, he returned to Sudan through a voluntary repatriation programme, hoping to rebuild the life that war had interrupted. But five years later, fighting reached Nyala, where he had settled, forcing him to flee again. In 2023, he returned to Iridimi, to the very house he had once hoped to leave behind. His experience reveals one of the cruelest uncertainties of displacement: returning home does not necessarily mean finding safety. When conflict continues, even the decision to start again can become another beginning of the same ordeal.
And as families like Ahmad's struggle to find a place where they can finally settle, thousands more are arriving with the same hope. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), more than 55,000 Sudanese refugees entered eastern Chad in 2026 by late September. Over 190,000 refugees remained in difficult conditions near the border, awaiting relocation, while approximately 31,000 families lacked adequate shelter. Chad has continued to receive people escaping Sudan's violence despite its own limited resources. Yet the growing numbers expose a painful reality: crossing a border may end the immediate danger of war, but it does not necessarily end the struggle to survive.
For those who have already found shelter, survival presents another challenge. In Iridimi, Ahmad and his relatives cultivated small plots of land, hoping to grow enough sorghum and millet to reduce their dependence on humanitarian assistance. Severe drought, however, destroyed their harvest in 2026. With little produce to rely on, the family became increasingly dependent on aid just as that assistance was becoming less reliable. Reuters reported that Ahmad's family of four had seen the value of its monthly food assistance fall to approximately US$7, leaving them unable to afford basic goods in the market. After more than two decades in exile, even the ability to provide a meal remained beyond their control.
Their struggle is part of a wider food crisis. The World Food Programme (WFP) reported assisting approximately 900,000 Sudanese refugees in Chad during August. By September, severe funding shortages had forced the organisation to prioritise newly arrived refugees, reducing support for others who remained dependent on assistance. For aid agencies, the decision reflects an increasingly difficult balance between urgent needs and limited resources. For refugees, however, the consequences are painfully immediate. A family that fled war twenty years ago does not necessarily need food any less than one that arrived yesterday. Yet when assistance is reduced, the length of time a person has survived in exile can become another source of uncertainty.
Nor can refugees easily replace declining assistance with income of their own. According to FEWS NET, the international food-security monitoring organisation, Wadi Fira and several other eastern Chadian provinces were projected to face Crisis-level food insecurity through January 2027. Rainfall deficits, dependence on markets and pressure on local livelihoods have made affordable food increasingly difficult to secure. In a region where farming is vulnerable to drought and employment opportunities are limited, economic independence cannot be achieved simply through determination. For families like Ahmad's, the problem is not an unwillingness to work, but the absence of reliable opportunities to turn that work into security.
Yet the burden of this prolonged crisis extends beyond the refugees themselves. Eastern Chad's host communities also face poverty, weak infrastructure, and pressure on essential services. As more families arrive, demand for land, water, healthcare and education grows, stretching resources that were already insufficient. This makes the crisis more complex than a simple division between those receiving assistance and those providing it. Refugees and local residents often confront the same scarcity, and lasting solutions must address the needs of both. Without investment in shared infrastructure and livelihoods, humanitarian assistance risks becoming a temporary response to an increasingly permanent problem.
Efforts to break that cycle have begun. UNHCR reported that Chad had recognised the qualifications of more than 400 refugee healthcare workers, while at least 2,900 refugee teachers were working in schools across the east. WFP has also supported agricultural and infrastructure initiatives intended to strengthen livelihoods among refugees and host communities. These measures demonstrate that refugees are not merely recipients of assistance; they possess skills, experience, and the ability to contribute to the societies sheltering them. Nevertheless, legal access to employment means little without sufficient jobs, resources, or functioning services. Emergency relief can preserve lives, but genuine independence requires opportunities that continue long after the initial crisis has faded from international attention.
And while adults struggle to secure those opportunities, their children are growing up within the same uncertainty. An April 2026 UNICEF report identified eastern Chad's refugee-hosting provinces as among the country's most deprived, warning that repeated displacement was placing additional pressure on education, child protection and essential services. These conditions threaten more than immediate well-being. Education shapes the opportunities available to children as they grow older, and limited access to learning can reinforce disadvantages across generations. For children born or raised in refugee camps, the consequences of war may therefore extend far beyond the violence their parents originally escaped.
Perhaps the deepest injustice lies in what children inherit without ever having chosen it. They did not start the war, determine where their families would flee, or decide how international assistance would be distributed. Yet the opportunities available to them are shaped by each of those decisions. Their parents may have succeeded in protecting them from immediate violence, but protection alone cannot guarantee education, employment or the freedom to build an independent life. The ability to survive should never be mistaken for the opportunity to thrive.
Humanitarian organisations have consequently called for sustained international funding and a greater emphasis on long-term development alongside emergency assistance. Such efforts require cooperation among donor governments, humanitarian agencies and Chad's authorities, as well as renewed attention to resolving the conflict in Sudan. Providing food and shelter remains essential, but so does investing in education, employment and local infrastructure. Refugee families should not have to choose between the dangers of returning to an unstable homeland and a future defined entirely by dependence on shrinking aid. The international community's responsibility should not end once people have crossed into relative safety.
For Ahmad, that choice remains painfully unresolved. He has already escaped war twice, returned to the same camp, and watched his own children begin their lives where his childhood was interrupted. According to Reuters, he would leave with his family if he could find somewhere else to go. His story is no longer simply about a man seeking refuge from conflict, but about a generation struggling to ensure that its children do not inherit the same uncertainty.
Each rainy season, Ahmad can repair the walls of the house that has sheltered his family for more than two decades. But the years his children spend waiting for a future beyond those walls cannot be rebuilt.
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