Sudan

Many women in rural Sudan spend hours every day collecting firewood to use for fuel. They then have to cook with this wood, breathing in toxic fumes that are dangerous to their health. The girls in the family often have to help with the wood collection. Their education suffers because they have less time for school and there are no reliable light sources for them to study by later in the day.

The clean cook stoves and briquettes we’re helping to introduce are changing lives. These stoves use less fuel and produce less dangerous smoke. They mean that women are freed from spending half their day collecting wood and can use their time more productively in the home and in business. And the whole family is healthier now that the air is clean and smoke-free.

We’re also supporting entrepreneurs, many of them women, to set up new businesses that support our projects. These include making and selling clean cook stoves and clean fuel briquettes. We’re helping these entrepreneurs get hold of funding to kick-start their new businesses and giving them training in basic business skills, such as budgeting and marketing. In this way, our work is helping advance the local economy, as well as benefiting individuals and the environment.

Few of Sudan’s farmers have alternative livelihood skills to rely on during bad harvests. Traditional coping mechanisms such as reducing the number of meals eaten in a day, over-grazing and over-cultivation can be harmful to the families and to the environment. The changing climate makes people even more vulnerable. Farmers struggle to cope in the face of severe droughts and other extreme weather events.

We’ve implemented solutions that combine traditional agriculture practices with advances in technology and science. We use innovative approaches that maximise harvests while protecting the soil and other natural resources. This approach is often referred to as ‘agroecology’.

Our work has enabled people to use renewable energy and data about the weather. This allows them to cope better with the changing climate and improve their resilience to droughts and floods.

In the next year, we’ll help make 50,000 farmers and pastoralists more productive. We’ll share our knowledge with local and national Government so that our solutions can have the greatest possible impact.

Clean drinking water, proper sanitation and adequate sewage disposal are basic human needs. But many millions of Sudanese people still find themselves without these things. In urban slums, lack of household sanitation is a particular issue for women. Pollution and inadequate handwashing facilities make transmission of water-borne diseases such as cholera more likely.

This year, we continued our work with partners in Sudan to get drinking water, sanitation and waste services to people living in slums and other poor urban areas. We focused our efforts on delivering safely-managed sanitation and water,  and on improving hygiene behaviour. We encouraged decision-makers to plan and budget for waste management in a way that’s more inclusive of informal waste workers and delivers a better service.

We hope to reach about 160,000 people in North Darfur through a planned approach to sanitation, hygiene promotion and clean water. We’ll collaborate with seven local partners to achieve this transformation by 2021.