Sudan’s war has driven more than fourteen million people from their homes, the largest displacement crisis in the world. Against that catastrophe, a small scholarship program is keeping fewer than four hundred university students enrolled. The number is tiny, but the point of the program is not the number. It is the statement that a generation’s future does not have to be defined by the conflict around it.
The scholarships come through the DAFI program, run by UNHCR with the Windle Trust and funded by the Mastercard Foundation. They cover tuition and living costs, and they provide something less visible and arguably more important: psychological support, mentoring, and a community of peers who have gone through the same losses. For students displaced once, twice, sometimes three times, that combination is what keeps them in school. The scholarship is not a luxury. It is a lifeline.
Sarah Tekhlu, an Eritrean refugee, was forced to move from Khartoum to Wad Madani and then to Port Sudan, each move another cut from her education. She had concluded that a university education was beyond her reach. The scholarship changed that. She is now pursuing an information management qualification at Comboni College while working as a kindergarten teacher, and her ambition is to open her own school. Azhari Ibrahim fled North Darfur for Port Sudan midway through his civil engineering studies at the University of Kordofan. He wants to use the degree to help rebuild communities destroyed by the war.
Their stories are the human face of a statistic too large to imagine: fourteen million displaced, thirty million people in need of humanitarian assistance, a war that has killed tens of thousands and pushed much of the country into famine. Against that, a scholarship for a few hundred students sounds like a gesture, and in one sense it is. But the students describe the difference it makes in terms that have nothing to do with tuition. One said the support made her believe in herself again and dream again. Another said the program gave him not just money but community and psychological support, someone nearby. The program funds not just degrees but the conviction that the future is still worth preparing for.
The program also builds the capacity to rebuild. Students who make it through become advocates, helping other displaced young people navigate university admissions and scholarship applications. In May, a workshop in Port Sudan brought twenty-five students together to work on expanding access to higher education. Each graduate becomes an example to others and, more concretely, a trained engineer, teacher or manager who will be needed the day the war ends and Sudan starts to rebuild. The scholarships are not an escape from the country. They are an investment in the people who will have to put it back together.
There is a hard truth underneath the hopeful stories, and the students themselves state it: without peace, nothing else can be built. The scholarships do not end the war, do not feed the hungry, do not stop the bombs. What they do is keep a small flame burning, a reminder that the generation being scattered by the conflict is still capable of learning, still capable of dreaming, and still intends to be there when the rebuilding begins. In a war that has spent three years trying to destroy Sudan’s future, that may be the most defiant act available. Fourteen million people have lost their homes. A few hundred students have refused to lose their futures, and they are the proof that the rest can be rebuilt.