Sudan is living through the largest displacement crisis in the world. Behind the vast numbers is a simpler, harder truth: millions of families no longer know where their people are.
Missing From Sudan
July 2026
It is hard to feel a number as large as this one. By the end of 2025, around 9.1 million people were displaced inside Sudan, forced from their homes but still within the country’s borders, in what has become the largest displacement crisis in the world.
Millions more have crossed into neighbouring countries. UN agencies count roughly 2.8 million Sudanese who have sought refuge abroad, many of them in Chad, Egypt, South Sudan and beyond. Taken together, close to one in three people from Sudan has been forced from home.
Displacement on this scale does something quieter than the headlines capture: it separates people. When a family leaves in different directions on different days, when phones are left behind and routes split at a border, the people themselves become hard to trace. A missing person is very often not lost to the world, only lost to the family that is searching.
This is where communities carry the weight. Neighbours pass a photograph from phone to phone. Relatives abroad make calls across three countries in a single afternoon. The Sudanese diaspora has become a search network of its own, stretching from Port Sudan to Cairo to cities across Europe.
Missing From Sudan was built for that network. Every case on the registry is one family’s attempt to be seen by the one stranger who might hold the missing piece. The numbers are overwhelming; a single name, kept visible, is something a person can actually act on.
Sources: UNHCR and the IOM Displacement Tracking Matrix, Sudan displacement figures (2025).