When people are forced to flee, phone lines fail and families scatter across borders. A quiet, decades-old network helps them reconnect, one traced name and one phone call at a time.
Missing From Sudan
July 2026
Separation rarely announces itself. A network goes down, a family moves in a hurry, a phone is lost at a border crossing, and suddenly a mother in one country has no way to reach a son in another.
For families divided by Sudan’s displacement, one of the most important lifelines is the work known as Restoring Family Links, run by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) together with the Sudanese Red Crescent and the wider global Family Links Network.
The scale is quietly enormous. In 2024 alone, the ICRC and partner Red Cross and Red Crescent societies helped make around 400,000 phone calls for Sudanese refugees in South Sudan, Chad, Egypt and Ethiopia, so they could try to reach relatives still inside Sudan. The same network has registered tracing requests for roughly 10,000 people reported missing, inside the country and beyond its borders.
Some of the most careful work is done for children who crossed a border alone. Tracing an unaccompanied child back to surviving family, often in a different country, can take months of patient searching.
Families inside Sudan can reach the ICRC’s Restoring Family Links helpline, and Red Crescent and Red Cross offices in Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia and South Sudan help those who have crossed the border. It is slow work, delayed by distance, damaged infrastructure and the sheer number of requests, but it reunites people every week.
Missing From Sudan exists alongside efforts like these. A public registry cannot replace a tracing service, but it can widen the circle of people who might recognise a face, and it can keep a name visible until the day someone answers.
Sources: International Committee of the Red Cross, “FAQ: ICRC work in Sudan” and the Restoring Family Links programme (2024–2025).