UN News Today 16 January 2026 |

In Sudan, UN rights chief Türk highlights plight of war victims

The Sudan war has uprooted 12 million people and many still lack a safe place to shelter – particularly survivors of sexual violence – UN human rights chief Volker Türk said on Friday.

Speaking from Dongola, capital of Northern state, Mr. Türk said that NGO partners needed “an all-out effort” from the international community to help support their vital work:

“What they are telling me is about the horrible plight that many people, many providers of this horrific war, are going through every day…They don’t have enough settlements for those who got internally displaced, some of them many times. There’s no proper solution for the women who have suffered sexual violence because the space is not there. There is not enough attention paid to people with disabilities.”

The UN rights chief said that NGOs were the first responders to people in crisis and were critical to Sudan’s future, but they need protection and help to do their work.

After 1,000 days of war in Sudan, with millions displaced, 21 million are going hungry and famine has been confirmed in parts of the country.

In Ukraine, families in constant survival mode amid deadly cold and attacks

Families across Ukraine are in “constant survival mode” amid ongoing waves of Russian attacks and sub-zero temperatures, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Friday.

The alert follows another night of attacks against power infrastructure in Zaporizhzhia oblast in the south and Kharkiv oblast in the east which have left many residential areas without electricity and heating.

The agency’s Munir Mammadzade described how people are now stuffing soft toys against their windows to block out the freezing cold:

“Of course (we’re) increasingly worried about right now in Kyiv, it’s -15°C, it might go even further down next week and millions of families across the country are again enduring days without heating, as I mentioned, electricity and water supplies. So, children and families are in constant survival mode because of that.”

Until now, the humanitarian focus has been on frontline areas, but constant Russian strikes on power stations and residential areas have highlighted a far more complicated set of needs among people living in cities. 

These include Kyiv resident Svitlana who looks after her three-year-old daughter, Adina, on the 10th floor of her building. UNICEF said that she had no heating or electricity for more than three days initially, and the disruption is continuing for a third week.

Central and West Africa: Famine and malnutrition “mean that people are dying”, says WFP

Finally, to Central and West Africa where a staggering 55 million people are expected to endure crisis levels of hunger – or worse – during this year’s lean season from June to August. 

More than 13 million children are also expected to suffer from malnutrition in 2026, according to the UN World Food Programme (WFP).

In an alert, the agency warned that the number of people facing emergency food insecurity in West and Central Africa has doubled since 2020, to three million people.

And for the first time in 10 years, around 15,000 people in Borno state, northeast Nigeria, are just a step away from famine. “That does mean that people are dying,” said WFP’s Jean-Martin Bauer: 

“The causes of this need to be understood; the last rainy season in West Africa, which ended in October, was relatively favourable. The crops are doing fine overall in the region, there was even flooding in some areas. So, this is not a due to the climate. The vulnerabilities we’re seeing in West and Central Africa right now are really due to violence. They’re also due to the fact that there have been large funding cuts to essential systems to support the population.” 

Funding cuts have forced WFP to stop providing assistance to about 300,000 children in Nigeria. 

And in Cameroon, the agency may need to cut assistance to half a million people next month, in order to focus on Nigeria.

The World Food Programme has long worked with governments and communities to provide stability and reassurance to the most vulnerable.

In the past, the agency has worked to improve resilience by supporting school meals and other projects in the community, such as restoring hundreds of thousands of hectares of land for farmers, which it says has protected around four million people from climate shocks.

Daniel Johnson, UN News