Amina Khalafallah earns 300,000 Sudanese pounds a month working in a cafeteria. She spends 300,000 Sudanese pounds a month on water. That equation — entire salary equals water — is the arithmetic of life in Port Sudan's Deim Mayo neighbourhood, where homes lack piped connections and street vendors are the only source of supply. Her husband works in another state and sends money when he can. She borrows regularly. She is not unusual. The numbers trace a supply chain designed to extract at every link. A 50,000-litre tanker costs 1.5 million pounds today, up from 450,000 before the war — a 233% increase. Distribution station operators charge vendors 16,000 pounds to fill a 250-litre donkey cart. Vendors then sell 18-litre containers to households for 1,000 pounds each, meaning 250 litres retails for roughly 13,900 pounds — a margin that looks thin until you see it repeated thousands of times daily across a city of one million people. The vendor chain is not profiteering; it is the last-resort market that emerges when infrastructure collapses. The Arbaat Dam's failure in August 2024 triggered the current crisis. The dam once supplied half of Port Sudan's daily water. Heavy rains and flooding destroyed it, along with downstream villages, pipelines, and wells. Entire neighbourhoods shifted overnight from partial piped access to complete dependence on trucked water. The city's supply was already meeting less than 40% of demand before the dam broke. Sudan's war, now past its third year, is the structural accelerant. The UNDP reports that average incomes have been pushed back to early-1990s levels. Port Sudan, relatively safe from direct fighting, has absorbed waves of internally displaced people, swelling its population to an estimated one million and overloading infrastructure built for a fraction of that. The African Development Bank calls access to safe water one of Sudan's most urgent needs, with millions of children at risk of waterborne diseases. Rehabilitation efforts exist but cannot close the gap. The UNDP has drilled or rehabilitated 15 boreholes, laid 17 kilometres of new pipeline, and installed solar-powered pumps — enough to supply 230,000 people. That leaves 770,000 people in Port Sudan still dependent on the vendor chain. A separate AfDB-UNICEF project launched in June aims to reach 750,000 people, but it is nascent and the timeline is unclear. The public health consequences are compounding. Dr. Emad Hafez, medical director of emergency at Port Sudan Teaching Hospital, warns that water shortages drive families to untreated sources, increasing cholera and diarrhoeal disease risk — particularly in overcrowded displacement camps during rainy season. Storing water in uncovered containers breeds mosquitoes, raising malaria and dengue risk. Hospitals themselves need reliable water for infection prevention and patient care; the shortage threatens the healthcare system from within. What emerges is a textbook extraction cascade where no single actor is the villain. War destroys incomes and displaces populations. A dam collapse eliminates half the supply. Fuel costs inflate the vendor chain. Families at the bottom absorb every cost with no buffer and no alternative. The rehabilitation pipeline is real but covers roughly a quarter of need. The rest is market-priced survival in a city where survival now costs a full salary.
