Port Sudan: The figures around Sudan have grown so vast they almost stop meaning anything. Roughly 33.7 million people, three in five of them children, need help this year to survive a war the outside world has largely stopped watching. Sudan aid has become the sharpest test of whether Europe still backs its humanitarian promises with money as other donors quietly walk away.

The European Union answers, for now, with cash. Brussels has allocated €162 million for lifesaving assistance inside Sudan this year, and its overall 2026 contribution across Sudan and its neighbours reaches €276.3 million. At an international conference in April the European Commission went further and pledged €360.8 million, splitting the sum between people trapped inside the country and refugees who have fled into Chad, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, Egypt, Libya and the Central African Republic.

Those commitments build on a long record. Since 2013 the EU and its member states have channelled more than €1 billion into the Sudan emergency, and together they now form the largest donor to the response. When Sudanese families reach a clinic or a food line, European money often paid for it.

The context makes that steadiness striking. The Commission opened the year with a €1.9 billion global humanitarian budget just as 239 million people worldwide needed help and several major governments slashed their own aid. Europe chose to hold its line while others retreated, and Sudan absorbs a large share of the strain.

Money, though, is only half the battle. Cash cannot move through a country whose warring commanders treat aid convoys as leverage and starvation as a tactic. Trucks stall at checkpoints, warehouses burn and relief staff bury colleagues. Aid workers describe convoys held for weeks at a time while children waste away within sight of stocked warehouses. Europe can fund the food, yet it cannot guarantee that the food reaches a mother in Darfur, and that limit exposes the uncomfortable truth of humanitarian giving without a ceasefire.

So the coming months will judge more than the size of Europe’s cheque. They will test whether Brussels can convert its financial weight into diplomatic pressure, leaning on the generals and their foreign backers to open the roads its money has already paid to fill. Generosity keeps people alive one ration at a time. Access keeps them alive for good. Europe has proved it will spend on Sudan. It has yet to prove it can make that spending count.