War Forces Young Sudanese Into Entrepreneurship as Jobs Vanish

Sudan's civil war has shattered careers and upended livelihoods, pushing a generation of young people to build their own paths to income through art, small businesses, and entrepreneurship. For many who have been displaced and cut off from formal employment, self-reliance has become a matter of survival rather than ambition.

Yousra Hussein's story captures the scale of that disruption. After earning a medical laboratory sciences degree from Nahda College in 2022, she began building a women's empowerment initiative called Golden Women in Nyala, a city in western Sudan. The project offered psychosocial support sessions and training in marketing and entrepreneurship, reaching more than 70 women. Its goal was to equip young women with the practical skills they often lack when pursuing available opportunities.

That trajectory ended when Sudan's civil war erupted in April 2023. By June of that year, Yousra and her family had fled Nyala for Sennar, a central Sudanese city she had never previously visited. "Before the war, I was ambitious and had many dreams," she told Al Jazeera. "I started from zero in Sennar, without work experience or connections."

Unable to secure formal work in an unfamiliar city, Yousra began offering nail services from home, charging roughly $10 to $15 and saving what she could to support her family. Her efforts to rebuild were interrupted again when fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces spread to Sennar in mid-2024, forcing a second displacement to Kassala in eastern Sudan.

Starting over a third time, Yousra found an economy collapsing under the weight of the conflict. With few jobs available and a growing need for women to earn money for their families, she revived the Golden Women initiative. The project has generated some income, but funding remains a persistent obstacle.

Yousra described a set of barriers that confront young Sudanese entrepreneurs: limited access to skills training and institutional support, bank requirements for guarantees that many cannot provide, complex registration procedures, and taxes that make it difficult to establish and sustain a business.

Her difficulties mirror a broader collapse in employment and livelihoods across the country. A 2024 joint report by the United Nations Development Fund and the International Food Policy Research Institute surveyed 3,000 urban households. It found that 31 percent had been displaced, while the share reporting no employment or income climbed from 1.6 percent before the war to about 18 percent at the time of the survey. Full-time employment fell by half.

The World Bank estimates that even as the economy grew modestly last year, with the government attempting to stabilise areas under its control, the share of the population living in extreme poverty rose from 33 percent in 2022 to 59 percent in 2025. The figures underscore how the conflict has deepened hardship even in regions where some degree of normalcy has returned.

For young people whose education and livelihoods have been interrupted, the shrinking labour market has steered many toward entrepreneurship and informal work. Yet limited skills and experience often leave them ill-prepared to run a business on their own, creating a gap between necessity and capability.

International and government-backed programmes have stepped in to help fill that gap. The International Labour Organization said in May that its i-UPSHIFT programme had reached 500 young people in Kassala, offering entrepreneurship training, mentorship, and business incubation. Thirty-eight youth-led teams involving 160 participants, including 66 internally displaced people, pitched business and social-enterprise ideas.

Sudan's Ministry of Youth and Sports has also promoted vocational training and youth-led projects. Minister Ahmed Adam Ahmed told Al Jazeera that two youth conferences were held in Atbara and Kassala to understand the views and aspirations of young people and to equip them with practical, income-generating skills. One outcome of the first conference was a proposed industrial city in River Nile State designed to support youth-led enterprises. Ahmed said projects were directed toward implementation in states considered safe, with some already under way, while the Kassala conference focused on practical applications and innovation, particularly artificial intelligence and the use of agricultural waste.

The struggle to earn a living after displacement extends well beyond Yousra's experience. Mahira, a 30-year-old visual artist who did not wish to give her full name, relocated to Port Sudan after her home in Khartoum was damaged during the war. She now paints decorative pieces and murals, earning about 1 million Sudanese pounds, or roughly $130 at parallel market exchange rates, to help support her husband and son.

Before the war, Mahira earned a degree in French and completed a diploma in fine arts, both from Sudan University of Science and Technology. Since being displaced, she has worked a variety of jobs, driven by a single priority: securing any income, no matter how modest, to meet her family's daily needs.

Taken together, the experiences of Yousra and Mahira reflect how war has reshaped the economic lives of Sudan's youth. Where formal employment has disappeared, creativity and informal enterprise have become essential tools for survival, even as structural obstacles, from inaccessible financing to burdensome registration rules, continue to limit how far those efforts can go.