The crisis in Sudan shows us telecommunication is an essential human right

opinion

An internally displaced woman serves wild boiled leaves for food to orphaned children at an IDP camp in the Nuba Mountains in Sudan, in June, 2024.

Rebecca Tinsley is a former BBC journalist and the founder of Waging Peace, a human rights group that has been working in Sudan since 2004.

In the Nuba Mountains in southern Sudan, around 4 million people currently shelter on the brink of starvation . Hunger is everywhere you look. Women sift through sand searching for small nuggets of grain, while others boil herbs foraged from the local bush.

Despite decades of international neglect, and often overshadowed by conflict in Darfur in the west of Sudan, the Nuba Mountains have recently become a key hotspot in what the United Nations has described as one of the world’s worst humanit