Sudan Crisis (Since April 2023)

By Richard Odigiri
October 4, 2025

How the war began

The current war in Sudan started on 15 April 2023, when the Janjaweed militias, known today as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), attacked the presidential palace in Khartoum and attempted to capture the head of Sudan’s government, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. The Sudanese army fought back and very quickly, fighting spread across the cities.

These militias, many of whom came from outside Sudan, committed widespread atrocities: killing civilians, looting, raping, and destroying property. Khartoum city was almost completely destroyed. Wealthier families managed to flee abroad, while many others migrated north or to Al-Gezira state in central Sudan.

Humanitarian impact of the war

The RSF imposed tight sieges on several cities, cutting off food, medicine, and basic supplies. Children and the elderly began dying from hunger and lack of healthcare. Despite immense destruction, the Sudanese army gradually regained strength and managed to push the RSF out of Khartoum and Al-Gezira state after months of fierce battles.

As the RSF retreated, they regrouped in Kordofan and El Fasher (North Darfur) — areas they knew well. There, they once again imposed sieges, surrounding cities and camps, trapping hundreds of thousands of civilians without food, clean water, or medicine.

El Fasher today

El Fasher is now one of the most devastated cities in Sudan, where the ongoing siege has left people in catastrophic conditions. Families are surviving on little or no food as markets are empty and aid cannot enter, while most hospitals have been destroyed or are out of service, leaving the sick and injured without medicine or treatment.

With bodies left unburied in the streets during earlier battles, epidemics have spread, and deadly diseases such as dengue fever are rising rapidly due to poor sanitation and the collapse of healthcare.

Thousands of children are at severe risk, suffering from malnutrition and illnesses that could otherwise be prevented. El Fasher remains under siege, with civilians facing famine, disease, and constant attacks.

Flooding across Sudan

As if the war was not enough, Sudan has also been struck by heavy flooding in September 2025. Torrential rains swept through many states, destroying homes and farmland. Farmers lost large portions of their crops, worsening food shortages in a country already on the brink of famine.

In displacement camps, floodwaters contaminated drinking water and sanitation facilities, increasing the risk of cholera and other waterborne diseases. The floods also blocked aid delivery routes, making it even harder for supplies to reach those most in need.

Sudan today faces a triple crisis of war, disease, and natural disaster. The ongoing conflict and sieges continue to kill and starve civilians, while deadly outbreaks such as dengue fever and cholera spread unchecked due to the collapse of the health system. At the same time, severe flooding has destroyed homes and farmland, leaving farmers without crops and millions of people deeper in hunger. The people of Sudan—especially those trapped in El Fasher—are enduring unimaginable suffering, caught between man-made violence and natural disasters, with little help able to reach
them.

Why Plateful Cafe?

What is Plateful Cafe? Firstly, let’s establish what is Plateful Café? Plateful Café is a social enterprise that connects refugees and local people through a shared love of good food. Our primary objective at Plateful is to establish a physical café where we can serve food lovingly created by our Refugee Chefs. There were a couple of motivations at hand when we decided to set up Plateful Café. First let’s start with the obvious – fantastic food, food is as close as we really get to a universal shared language. In the absence of a common language, food is such an interesting insight into another culture: from the extraordinary precision of sushi to the shared eating experience of Injera, a food popular in Ethiopia. We wanted Plateful to be an insight into the lives and stories of the Refugee chefs who lovingly create the dishes. Whilst much of life is sadly left behind when you are forced to flee your home, knowledge and recipes remain. In this way, food for many of us is so much more than just what’s on your plate. Secondly, the unfortunate reality is that in many charities that involve refugees creating and selling their products, the refugees themselves are detached, or at worst removed, from important decisions and directions the charity takes. At Plateful we are committed to ensuring that every decision we make not only puts the interests of Refugees first but, crucially, is made with Refugees. Finally, we wanted the café and our events leading up to its formation to be a springboard for greater social and cultural cohesion. Today, more than ever, we seem to live in echo chambers. We socialise with the same people, see the same views on LinkedIn, go to the same restaurants. Plateful Café aims to be an antidote to that by creating a space where people from different backgrounds can come together, regardless of social status or background, to share a love of good food. The pay-what-you-can pricing system and the location of the café in a community-owned pub are designed to encourage this kind of interaction. Our Valentine’s Day Dinner on the 15th of February officially marks the start of our journey and it is exciting. We know the journey will most certainly not be a smooth one, but we’ve got a fantastic (growing!) team and we’re all united by a common goal: spreading world flavours by refugee chefs. If you are free, we’d love for you to join us for our dinner later this month: not only to try delicious food but to meet a community of like minded people, all committed to making our society just that bit of a nicer place to be. We hope to see you there.

A Plate Full of Love Plateful Cafes Logo

The idea behind Plateful Cafe is simple. We employ refugees with a talent for cooking and they use their skills to share amazing food with the local community. People who could otherwise wait years to enter the UK workforce find meaningful work more quickly, and Londoners benefit from the amazing culture they bring with them. But as much as the idea is straightforward, putting it across visually is not so much. We wanted to show that Plateful Cafe is the place to come for vibrant, healthy food and that doing so will benefit the community. The design also needed to work across the organisation, from the cafe itself to our catering and our market stalls. That’s a hefty brief. So, we kept it simple. We focused on three core parts of our mission and grew the design from there. The Plate As obvious as it sounds, the plate is central to everything we do. A full plate means you’re fulfilled, safe, and not wanting. It also implies arrival, togetherness, and the ability to provide to others. Our plate is one of variety, filled with food from many sources and cultures. We were inspired by an Arabic design to form the border of our logo. This design will show up all across our brand, from jam labels to banners. The Heart But Plateful Cafe isn’t like other cafes – there’s a lot more to it than the tableware, which provides things for people to consume. Somehow, we needed to show that this food is connected with refugees. That it has a social impact. And that it is a warm place of welcome. How better to show this than with a heart? One that isn’t cutesy or kitsch but that unashamedly sits at the core of everything we do. Just like the cafe itself is refugee-led, the logo revolves around the heart at its centre. The Beetroot A plate and a heart go some way to describing our charity, but they miss one crucial thing – our cooking. This was the most difficult part of the design. Should we focus on the process of preparation, with utensils showing the expertise of our chefs? Or should we focus on the chefs themselves, with a chef’s hat? We tried both options, but they weren’t quite right. In the end, we decided that it’s the food itself that helps our chefs connect with the community and vice versa. The humble beetroot shows that we’re a family kitchen, not something manufactured or artificial. Our food is healthy, handmade, and unique. And the cafe itself helps refugees in south London put down roots and flourish in their new environment. Our first design went through a couple of mutations before we were happy with it. We took inspiration from our very own pickled beetroot for the colour palate, and got help creating a custom font for the typography. But the core elements were there to stay – a full plate, a kind heart, and quality, fresh food that helps the community grow. Final Logo

Celebrating Volunteers Week

Volunteer Week Yesterday (7th), marked the end of Volunteer’s Week. As the name suggests, an annual celebration and recognition of the contribution that millions of people make across the UK through volunteering. To say that volunteers and the volunteering sector, in general underpin our local communities in this country would be an understatement. Volunteers provide a vital role and support a whole host of different activities: from community outreach to those most vulnerable, sport, all the way through to the arts and culture. And how could we get forget food! In a society that, unfortunately, feels increasingly isolating and obsessed on the individual, the continued existence of volunteers are a source of inspiration, encouraging us to think beyond ourselves and instead, into wider communities that we’re a part of. Simply put, we would not have got to where we are without the countless hours of work our volunteers have committed to Plateful Café. From our event staff helping at in-person events, the fundraising team seeking funding to help our charity grow and of course not forgetting the tireless work of our founder, Iolanda Chirico, does in making sure all areas of Plateful Café are moving in the right direction and towards our goal of having a café staffed and run by refugees. For Volunteers’ Week this year, we thought we would share two testimonies from our volunteers who’ve been volunteering with Plateful Café sharing how they got started at the charity and their thoughts on their respective journey and things to come! Testimonial #1 Albert “I started volunteering with Iolanda at what was then the Refugee Café in December 2020. Initially, I was part of the fundraising team, researching for grant applications, but soon switched to helping out on market stalls. This is where I discovered just how good to cause, and the products truly were. All the food was of such high quality, and clearly made with love. As I learned more about the chefs and how the organisation functioned, I knew it was something I wanted to keep on being a part of. Helping refugees find work and put down roots by sharing their cuisine and culture – what’s not to love? I became a regular face at Woolwich Market, and also helped out with other markets and events. I then took on responsibility for the web shop, but talking to people about our food and the people we worked with was still by far my favourite part of volunteering. Since the transition from Refugee Café to Plateful, I have helped with a couple of events – most notably our launch at Goldsmiths. I can’t wait for us to start trading at markets again, and more importantly, for us to finally achieve what we’ve all been working towards: opening a café staffed and run by refugees, where the community can come together around a table laden with delicious food!” Albert, Market Stall Volunteer Testimonial #2 Tejan “I started volunteering, like Albert, at the Refugee Café towards the end of 2021. was working in a job that didn’t feel very fulfilling and when I saw the advert for the Refugee Café and the premise of empowering local refugees through food it immediately felt like something that I believed in and thought was worth caring for. What, therefore, began as helping the charity with their internal communications, grew to helping to lead the marketing effort in what we now know as Plateful Café. I think what I’ve found most inspiring about the journey volunteering within our space is the number of people on the team all united by the belief to want to make our communities better places to be for refugees. To be completely honest, our journey so far has been a lot harder than I expected and, naturally, hasn’t been without its challenges. From issues surrounding cancellations of launches to of course the budgetary constraints that a charity in its infancy are bound to expect! Having said that, however, I’ve relished every minute volunteering at Plateful Café, I’m grateful for Iolanda for giving me the initial opportunity and am incredibly excited about what we achieve and finally sitting down in our café later this summer!” Tejan, Marketing Lead We’re always looking for more volunteers to help with Plateful Café and if you think this sort of thing is for you, why not have a look at our current vacancies!