Jane & Tom's Wedding Fundraiser - Sudan Refugees

Aim: If you were thinking of a wedding gift, we’d very much like you to consider supporting an active Sudanese refugee community in Eastern Chad

Farchana Refugee Camp was established in 2003 to support refugees displaced from Darfur, Sudan, with a population of over 50,000.  The extension of Farchana Refugee camp is now home to an additional 22,000 people from eastern Darfur after the outbreak of war in 2023.   

Conditions in Eastern Chad are particularly harsh, with very limited infrastructure, extreme heat, sometimes devastating winds (see here video footage of a storm last year), no paved roads, floods, and very limited capacity of local communities to support the needs of refugees. Poor shelter conditions can also result in fires, which can run through the camp very quickly.  

Even before recent significant cuts in humanitarian funding worldwide, water supplies were limited and unreliable, making life very difficult for families, at times having to rely on digging unhygienic shallow wells to access water.  

In recent weeks, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has also announced that, due to funding cuts, all secondary school education support would be cut. Education is absolutely critical to support normalcy in the lives of children, as well as build a foundation for their future.   

The men and women of the camp, with the support of an inclusive leadership structure (women and men of different abilities), have organised themselves to improve the lives of the most vulnerable.  The community includes technicians, engineers, teachers, nurses and university students.  Activities have included: voluntarily digging pipelines and repairs (by volunteering saving money to redirect to other vital needs), constructing classrooms and providing teaching through volunteers, setting up income generation projects, for example, motorbikes to provide local transport for markets and patients to health structures. A close friend has worked directly with the community and has seen firsthand the remarkable efforts they have made.

With your support, we’d like to encourage these grassroots community initiatives by funding projects to support education, income generation and water supplies. Given the fragile funding situation, working directly with the community aims to support a more sustainable approach. All the funds will be allocated directly to community projects and will be facilitated by contacts within the humanitarian community in the Farchana area.

The exact projects we support will depend on the amount of money we raise, but could include support for school materials, income generation for vulnerable families, building resilience into the water system, and increasing the number of tapstands for water supplies.

If you're interested in learning more, we have a few links.  Al Jazeera recently interviewed the community coordinator, Hatim, on the situation in the camp and Sudan and can be viewed here (from minute 17.00).  The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation also did a piece which describes the situation for Sudanese refugees in Eastern Chad, including an interview with the community coordinator - watch here. And a piece by the Guardian here.

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 28th August 2025 at 9:24pm