Lukas Eichelter has been in Khartoum for a week. The scene that greeted him as he approached Sudan's war-torn capital is still etched in the memory of the 34-year-old humanitarian aid worker. “When you land here, you see crashed planes, and the city is full of craters.”
Khartoum is completely destroyed
According to a report by the German Tages-Show website, Eichelter has been working with the World Food Program in Sudan since the beginning of the year, and is one of many relief workers helping people in a disaster-stricken area survive.
World Humanitarian Day has been celebrated annually since 2008 in honor of the efforts of relief workers, and commemorates the car bomb explosion in front of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad on August 19, 2003. The attack resulted in the death of the then High Commissioner for Human Rights, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and 21 other United Nations employees. Eichalter knows this unsettling feeling well. During its first week, drone attacks returned to Khartoum, a city full of mines.
After Gaza, Sudan is the second place where aid workers are killed or injured. Globally, more than 350 aid workers died in crisis areas last year.
“If you were not here, we would have starved.”
Sudan's area is more than five times the size of Germany, and 20 million people in this African country alone depend on humanitarian aid. A World Food Program employee says that about 5 million people suffer from severe food shortages, putting them at risk of extreme hunger.
But due to the decline in humanitarian aid funding globally, aid workers in Sudan can only distribute half the food rations needed to more than three million people, according to a German Tagesschau report.
Eichalter explains, "One food ration contains 2,100 calories, which means that these people live on only 1,050 calories per day that they receive from us, and this is all due to a lack of funding." Informing those affected about the reduction in food rations has become an essential part of their work.
The German government is significantly reducing humanitarian aid, and responsibility for humanitarian aid falls on the shoulders of the Federal Foreign Office. In the 2025 budget, it was halved to about 1.06 billion euros.
This year, only a little over one billion euros will be available, down from more than three billion euros in 2022. Serap Guler, State Secretary at the Federal Foreign Office, describes these cuts as painful but inevitable.
She says that helping those in need is in the interest of our vital security policy. She adds: "In a globalized world, it is very naive to think that this will not affect us in the end." The Christian Democratic Union politician hopes that the parliamentary process will lead to "additional support for humanitarian aid in Germany," according to the German Tagesschau report.
Lars Castellucci, a Social Democratic Party politician and Federal Government Commissioner for Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid, also views these cuts critically, but stresses the importance of using the money effectively.
He believes the humanitarian system needs reform. “In some countries, the work of the organizations overlaps, and the programs are not well articulated; there are duplicate structures,” he says. Funding cuts have prompted the international community to launch a comprehensive reform initiative, for which Germany provides strong support.
How will aid be prioritized now?
Budget cuts forced the German government to redefine priorities. Ralph Sudoff, of the think tank Center for Humanitarian Action, agrees.
He says, "Do we now provide aid to the people who are most important to us politically from our point of view, or to countries or partners with whom we want to achieve economic interests? Or do we act like a doctor, assessing those who most need our help?" Previously, the center praised the German government for allocating funds based on the actual needs of those in need of assistance.
But this situation is now changing radically. About 300 million people around the world depend on humanitarian aid, and Lukas Eichelter, a World Food Program volunteer for eight years, wants to continue his work.
"It's about food," he says. "From my point of view, it's a shame that there are still people suffering from hunger. This is what makes it relatively easy for me to get up early and try to make a small contribution to changing this situation."
