Two ongoing conflicts have significantly impacted children, and although there have been international discussions, little else appears on the horizon for resolution.
Sudan’s National Council for Child Welfare reports that between April 15, 2023, and the end of May 2025, more than 17 million Sudanese children have had no access to formal education. Mandeep O’Brien, the United Nations Children’s Fund Representative to Sudan, stated, “Before the war, we had 7 million children out of school. Since the war [started], we have 17 million children who are not in school. Again, if we looked at the data before the war, we knew that around 3 million children were acutely malnourished. Now, since the war, it’s almost close to 4 million children acutely malnourished.”
Five thousand have been kidnapped or missing, and three thousand children have died in the internal conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the rival Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
Child abuse has worsened since the outbreak of the war. Children have been forcibly recruited as fighters, and cases of sexual abuse and slavery have increased. There have been hundreds of cases of children who the RSF forced to join the conflict. “Some of them have returned to their families, some were killed in the conflict, and many were kidnapped. The scale of the violence is large and scary. We need huge collaboration in order to prevent a bigger crisis,” said Abdelgadir Abuh, secretary general of Sudan’s National Council for Child Welfare.
According to statistics from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) released on May 27, 2025, more than 50,000 children have been killed or injured since October 2023 in Gaza. The report indicated that the children in Gaza are suffering “a long, harrowing list of unimaginable horrors: the grave violations against children, the blockade of aid, the starvation, the constant forced displacement, and the destruction of hospitals, water systems, schools, and homes.”
The UNICEF report concluded, “The children of Gaza need protection. They need food, water, and medicine. They need a ceasefire. But more than anything, they need immediate, collective action to stop this once and for all,”
International efforts to mediate an end to both conflicts have not yielded much. The children of both regions have been caught in destructive forces that have robbed them of their innocence and, for some, their lives. Without ending these conflicts and making significant investments to return some semblance of normalcy and positivity within which the children can grow into adulthood, the chances of long-lasting resolution are improbable.
As these grave conflicts continue in the glaring light of intentional awareness and desensitization, what can we expect for the future? In the Caribbean, we will consider ourselves far removed from likely repercussions. But are we?
As part of the global village and regular destinations for international travellers, we could become the spaces for revenge attacks on people from countries who might be complicit in making no real effort to find resolutions.
We are limited in our capacity to provide tangible support. Our domestic and regional socio-economic challenges warrant that our limited, scarce resources are just sufficient for us. We can barely assist our nearby Haiti, where the negative impacts on large numbers of its children are centuries old. Are our voices raised regularly enough and loud enough in the international community? Have we spoken collectively from a single position, ensuring we maximise the impact? Could we also eventually reap the consequences from the malaise that seems to have gripped the international, influential players to move the needle and find positive outcomes to ease the horror and crisis for the children in these two conflict-struck areas?