Sudan’s civil war has produced a economic catastrophe so severe that even an immediate peace deal cannot undo it: projected cumulative GDP losses of $18.8 billion stretching to 2043, with average incomes already thrown back to levels last seen in the early 1990s. A quarter century of economic progress, erased in three years.
That projection, from a joint UNDP and Institute for Security Studies report timed to the conflict’s third anniversary in April 2026, assumes the most optimistic scenario — peace achieved this year. Every month that assumption proves wrong, the number grows. The question is no longer whether Sudan’s economy can be saved. It’s whether there will be anything left to rebuild.
What the Economy Looked Like Before
Sudan’s pre-war economy was fragile but functional. Agriculture employed a substantial majority of the workforce. The Khartoum refinery processed enough fuel to supply domestic needs. Industrial activity, while modest, was growing. The Sudanese pound, though weak, traded at several hundred per US dollar. The country was poor, but it had forward momentum — GDP per capita had been climbing, unevenly, since the mid-1990s.
That trajectory is now reversed. According to Al Jazeera, UNDP resident representative Luca Renda characterized the situation as witnessing the systematic erosion of Sudan’s future, not merely a crisis.
The Mechanisms of Economic Destruction
The collapse isn’t a single event but an interlocking set of destruction mechanisms, each compounding the others.
Currency implosion. The Sudanese pound now hovers in the thousands per US dollar. That kind of devaluation doesn’t just concern macroeconomists — it means a family that could afford basic food in March 2023 now cannot, and it means any import-dependent sector of the economy effectively ceases to function.
Agricultural collapse. Cultivated land has dropped significantly, but that figure understates the real damage because it doesn’t capture the disruption to supply chains, irrigation infrastructure, and market access that make farming viable in the first place. When the sector that employs most of your population cannot operate, the downstream effects touch everything.
Industrial shutdown. A substantial portion of power generation capacity has been lost. When factories have no electricity, industrial output doesn’t slow down gradually. It stops. The severe collapse in industrial activity reflects this binary reality.
Critical infrastructure as targets. The Khartoum refinery, the country’s sole major fuel processing facility, took repeated strikes before going offline permanently in mid-2023, severely reducing domestic fuel supply. Healthcare infrastructure has been systematically degraded — the World Health Organization has verified numerous attacks on healthcare facilities, and only a small fraction of those in conflict areas remain fully operational. Communications networks have been destroyed in many areas, cutting off civilians and humanitarian operations alike.
Compounding external shocks. A joint statement from the IMF, World Bank, and World Food Programme in early April characterized the Middle East conflict as causing massive disruption to global energy markets, with rising oil, gas, and fertilizer prices set to hit import-dependent economies hardest. Sudan is squarely in that category. Fuel prices inside Sudan have already risen sharply, according to WFP officials, with far steeper increases in remote areas. For a country that imports core commodities and has almost no functioning industrial base to generate export revenue, each external shock compounds the internal catastrophe.
Quantifying the Damage
The UNDP report puts hard numbers on what is otherwise an incomprehensible scale of loss. Billions in GDP were wiped out in 2023 alone. If the rate of destruction has not diminished — and the evidence suggests it hasn’t — Sudan is burning through what remains of its economic foundation at a pace that will soon leave nothing to rebuild.
The human dimensions make the economic data concrete: approximately 14 million people displaced, representing roughly a quarter of the population. The vast majority of displaced households report they cannot afford enough food. Famine conditions have been confirmed in Darfur and the Kordofans. These aren’t separate from the economic story — they are the economic story. Each displaced family represents lost labor productivity, abandoned farmland, destroyed household wealth.
The crisis has fallen hardest on Sudan’s most vulnerable populations, including disabled communities who face compounding barriers to survival in a country where basic services have effectively ceased to exist.
Why Peace Alone Cannot Fix This
The UNDP report’s most unsettling projections concern what happens after the fighting stops. Even if peace were achieved in 2026, Sudan would still face estimated cumulative GDP losses of $18.8 billion stretching into the 2040s. The reason is structural: the damage to human capital will take decades to reverse.
Consider the labor force pipeline. Fewer than one in five schools are functioning in some regions. An entire cohort of children is growing up without formal education. The economic cost of that lost human capital won’t appear in GDP figures for years, but the UNDP report models it as a key driver of the long-tail losses stretching into the 2040s and beyond. Renda described the generational cost in stark terms, noting that children born during the conflict face closed hospitals, non-functioning schools, and displaced families.
The destruction of women’s economic participation compounds this further. UN Women issued a report estimating that millions of people, mainly women and girls, require support related to sexual and gender-based violence, representing a dramatic increase from 2023. Systematic sexual violence doesn’t just destroy individual lives — it removes a massive segment of the productive population from economic activity, sometimes permanently.
Physical capital is equally slow to restore. Destroyed refineries, power plants, and irrigation systems require billions in investment and years of construction — neither of which will materialize without security guarantees that no faction can currently provide. A hospital recently welcomed its first patients after being forced shut by the war. But isolated reopenings do not constitute recovery in a country where the vast majority of healthcare facilities in conflict zones are partially or fully non-functional.
Even the natural resource base is degrading. Sudan’s historic acacia forests have been devastated as the war drives uncontrolled logging, stripping the country of ecological assets that underpin agriculture and export revenue.
Regional Contagion
Sudan’s economic collapse does not stop at its borders. According to UNHCR’s assessment, neighboring countries absorbing refugees are at breaking point. Chad, Egypt, and South Sudan have taken in millions of Sudanese refugees, placing enormous strain on their own fragile economies and social systems. Each of these host countries faces its own fiscal pressures; absorbing large displaced populations pushes them closer to their own tipping points.
The disruption to regional trade networks, agricultural supply chains, and labor markets extends the economic damage well beyond Sudan itself. The $18.8 billion projection captures only Sudan’s direct losses — the regional multiplier effect remains unquantified but almost certainly substantial.
The Policy Gap
The international response has been conspicuously inadequate relative to the scale of economic destruction. Humanitarians aim to support millions of people in 2026, but their multi-billion dollar plan remains critically underfunded. The Berlin conference in mid-April was the latest in a series of diplomatic efforts, but three years of such efforts have produced no ceasefire.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres continues to call for an immediate ceasefire, unrestricted humanitarian access, and safe passage for civilians. His Personal Envoy, Pekka Haavisto, held meetings with Sudanese armed groups and civilian political actors in Kenya last week before heading to Berlin.
Renda emphasized that stopping the conflict is the most urgent priority, noting that each additional month results in more deaths and deeper structural damage. The math supports his urgency. If billions in GDP lost during 2023 is any guide, Sudan is losing economic ground at a rate that makes the $18.8 billion projection look conservative with each passing quarter.
The projected losses stretching into the 2040s assume peace arrives this year. Every month that assumption proves wrong, the number grows. And with it grows the distance between Sudan’s present reality and any recognizable version of the economy that existed before April 15, 2023 — a gap that peace alone, whenever it comes, will not be enough to close.
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