In Sudan’s Displacement Camps, Some Families Are Choosing to Marry Off Their Daughters
Co-published with Egab.
At 16, Mihrab Hamed was still attending school, walking each day from her family’s makeshift home in El Obeid’s Al-Qubba neighborhood. Then her mother decided she would leave school and marry her cousin instead.
Hajja Musa, 41, says “the war left me no choice.” She and her two daughters, Mihrab, 16, and Muhaira, 9, fled the town of Hamrat al-Sheikh after it fell under the control of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The family had lived off farming and raising sheep; displacement took that away.
Sudan has been engulfed in war since 2023, when fighting broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The conflict has created the world’s largest displacement crisis and left millions facing acute hunger. Human rights groups and UN officials have repeatedly sounded the alarm over atrocities committed during the war. In February 2026, a UN report found that the RSF’s actions bore the “hallmarks of genocide.”
El Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan state, lies roughly 360 kilometers southwest of Khartoum and serves as a major commercial hub linking central Sudan with Darfur. The city is home to more than half a million people, as well as at least 100,000 internally displaced people, many of whom fled El Fasher in North Darfur and other cities devastated by the war, according to UN reports. The latest reports from El Obeid indicate that the RSF now controls nearly all routes surrounding the city, with the exception of the eastern corridor.
For two years, Hajja moved between shelters in El Obeid until a displaced family from Kampala gave her a house in Al-Qubba in January. She now sells tea in the market. Her husband works as a laborer in the market, unloading goods from trucks and vendors. Together, their daily earnings barely cover food.
Hajja says she and her husband leave home before dawn and do not return until nightfall, leaving their daughters alone for much of the day — a situation she says made her fearful for their safety. Amid those fears, a relative serving in the army offered to marry Mihrab, paid a dowry, and took the 16-year-old more than 300 miles away to Khartoum.
Hajja says she believed that if RSF forces entered El Obeid, girls would face violations, and that marrying Mihrab off “felt safer” than waiting. She says Mihrab's husband promised to let her finish her education. Asked directly about the marriage falling below Sudan's legal age of 18, Hajja didn't dispute it.
“The war took away the choice I would have otherwise made – to keep my daughter in school, to wait until she finishes her education and make her own choices,” she told More to Her Story.
Sexual violence has been used as a systematic weapon throughout Sudan’s war, according to UN Women’s latest report in April 2026. The number of women and girls requiring gender-based violence services in Sudan has quadrupled since the conflict began, reaching an estimated 12.7 million in 2026.
UN Women warned of an “emerging pattern of violence against women and girls in El Obeid, Sudan, where drone attacks during the day and sexual violence at night have left no safe window for women and girls to collect water — mirroring the atrocities documented in El Fasher last year,” noting that access to food, healthcare, and other essential services is also severely limited, particularly in displacement sites.
“I Wasn't Ready to Get Married”
From Al Minaa Al Barri displacement camp in El Obeid, 17-year-old Musra sat for Sudan’s national secondary school exams. She is still waiting for the results and hopes to study law.
But while she waited, her father, Mohammed Yassin, was making a different calculation. In late July, as RSF forces tightened their siege of El Obeid and fears of an assault on the city grew, he decided he would not uproot his three daughters again. Instead, he chose to marry all three of them off.
Musra was married to a man roughly 40 years her senior, who already had two wives and daughters her age and older. Her sister Mayada, 22, became the second wife of a man in his forties. Their older sister, Marwa, 26, married her cousin, to whom she had been engaged for three years—the only one of the three marriages that appeared to reflect the woman’s own choice.
“I wasn’t ready,” Musra said. But she felt she could not refuse: doing so, she said, would have meant being severely beaten by her father and seven brothers.
Musra is one of eight sisters; five were already married before the war began. She and her two sisters are the daughters of one of her father's wives, Umm Salma al-Khair, aged 55.
On the day of the marriage, Musra was simply told she would marry a man named Haj Abu Ali. No one asked her opinion. No one gave her the option to refuse. She describes being treated, in that moment, like an object to be cleared out of the house.
Musra said she had imagined a different sequence for her life: first an education, then work, and eventually marriage—on her own terms. “I had no real say in what happened instead,” she told More to Her Story.
Musra is 17, below the marriage age set by Sudan's 2010 Child Act, which is 18. She says customary marriages like hers are recorded informally and often aren't registered with the courts until years later, once the girl has reached the legal age on paper.
“The War Is Being Fought on Women’s Bodies”
Marwa Ibrahim, a social researcher and volunteer with feminist initiatives inside El Obeid's displacement camps, says the current war is being “waged on women's bodies,” and that women are bearing the brunt of it in every form, losing breadwinners and children, facing sexual and gender-based violence, and being married off as minors.
Ibrahim is direct about what this is: “a crime against girls. The government needs to criminalize the marriage of minors, tighten oversight, and hold accountable the families carrying out these marriages”.
“Child marriage isn't new in Sudanese society,” she told More to Her Story. “But it has intensified sharply under the current war, as displacement, and the erosion of both economic security and basic services like education and protection, strip families of the ability to provide for their daughters in other ways.”
According to UNICEF’s 2022 Child Marriage Factsheet, some 40 million women and girls in the Middle East and North Africa were married before the age of 18. Sudan has among the region’s highest rates of child marriage: nationally, an estimated 34% of women marry before 18, and 12% before 15. In East Darfur, the figure is higher still, with 57% of women aged 20 to 39 having been married before their 18th birthday.
She adds that “the war doesn't only threaten women’s and girls’ lives directly. It also risks foreclosing their access to education and economic independence — and it is pushing some families to treat marriage as a form of protection or a way to offload the burden of providing for a daughter, even when the girl herself is not ready, and has said so.”
UNICEF and UNHCR didn’t respond to emails and requests asking them to provide information and comments.
Fawzia al-Shayeb, an official at the African Organization for Rights and Development, an independent, non-profit non-governmental rights group, said that child marriage is a harmful reality that is widespread across Sudan, and “one that constitutes a form of gender-based violence,” a framing she was careful to stress.
“Some families marry off their daughters specifically to ease economic burdens: a decision, not an inevitability. Others face forced marriage as a direct result of wartime abuses and violence,” she added.
Mihrab’s and Musra’s stories are not isolated. As war grinds on in North Kordofan and displaced families face mounting pressures, families are increasingly marrying off their daughters, subjecting girls to a form of gender-based violence with lifelong consequences.