Holding small bags and young children, a dozen people wait in a wooden hut near a dry riverbed that marks the Sudan-Ethiopia border. Some 20-70 Sudanese arrive each day at the border town of Kurmuk before entering the Ethiopian province of Benishangul-Gumuz, says an official with the UN agency for migration overseeing the new arrivals from Sudan who are fleeing that country’s civil war.
“I thought my home was safe,” says Adiby Bain Abdallah (85), a recent Sudanese arrival sitting in a large tent at the Kurmuk transit centre. Abdallah, who is blind, says he walked for seven days with his 14-year-old granddaughter, Histeghlan, from his home in Damazin, the capital of Sudan’s Blue Nile State,which borders Ethiopia.
Damazin is held by the Sudanese army but faces intensifying drone attacks from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North, which together control western swathes of the Blue Nile State.
Abdallah says he and his granddaughter spent nine days hiding in the hills around Damazin with only water to consume as fighting intensified around the city, which is located alongside big energy infrastructure including a dam and power station.
The two returned to Damazin during a brief lull in the fighting before leaving for Ethiopia when the sound of bombings and gunfire once again rang out across the city at the end of March. “The conflict [in Sudan] is extending to every place in Sudan, there is no security and safety,” says Abdallah.
In another corner of the same tent, Amina Abdullah (20) nurses her three-month-old baby, Ahmad. She is originally from Nyala, the capital of south Darfur, which lies some 1,600km from Kurmuk. According to local media reports the city – which is under RSF control – has faced repeated aerial strikes from the Sudanese army in recent weeks as it attempts to oust its former military ally.
Abdullah fled Nyala in a pickup truck with her husband while heavily pregnant. “Our journey was very difficult because of all the checkpoints where we would be asked where we are from and who our tribe is.” She gave birth in Kosti, a city south of Khartoum which is facing drone attacks on key infrastructure and an outbreak of cholera. She eventually arrived in Ethiopia at the beginning of April with her newborn son.
The UN has said there is growing desperation in Sudan, in part due to reduced aid in the region. The Irish aid agency Goal provides meals at the Kurmuk transit centre, as well as at three refugee camps in the Benishangul-Gumuz region. The feeding programme, which is supported by the EU humanitarian office and the World Food Programme, is still operating but Goal’s global operations have been hit by cuts to USAid imposed by the Trump administration, with large job losses expected globally.
Jane Curtin, Goal’s head of communications, says US government funding cuts to other humanitarian aid agencies in the region may put further pressure on Goal’s feeding programme in Benishangul-Gumuz.
Another recent arrival in Kurmuk from Damazin, Arise Abdewa (35), came with her mother, sister, niece and children. Separated from her husband, Abdewa says earning an income to support her family is her priority in Ethiopia. “We need food, clothes and blankets”.
The lack of aid for refugees in Kurmuk has pushed many Sudanese refugees into mining gold in the economically poor but gold-rich region. Along the road from Kurmuk to Assosa, the capital of Benishangul-Gumuz, are a series of artisanal and small-scale gold mines owned by local Ethiopian and foreign investors. Sudanese typically work on a commission basis, keeping 10 per cent of any gold ore they find; while local Ethiopians receive a higher commission of 30 per cent.
The illicit gold mining sector has emerged and evolved in Ethiopia since 2018 due to “worsening conflict and insecurity in the country, in particular, since the war in Tigray began in 2020“‚ says Ahmed Soliman, a senior research fellow focused on Africa at Chatham House. “As a result of the insecurity, we’re seeing [the mining sector] increasingly informalised and outside of federal government control.”
He says: “The kind of regional state authorities and armed actors who have involvement in these supply chains are not using this resource to better improve the region, service delivery or to build infrastructure; they’re using it as an extractive resource to grow their own wealth.”
Workers at gold mines in Kurmuk face exposure to harmful chemicals such as mercury and cyanide, which can contaminate the surrounding water and soil, and which are associated with increased miscarriages, birth defects and deaths. At a gold mine at Uoldong along the Kurmuk-Assosa road which The Irish Times visited, workers lacked protective equipment, while two young Sudanese women were living in a tent between an open mine and an orange-hued waterhole used for panning gold.
A representative of Plan International, an international NGO which runs the Kurmuk transit centre along with the UN refugee agency and Ethiopian government refugee office, told The Irish Times it received reports in November 2024 that three Sudanese women were raped while working at a local gold mine.
Gold extracted in Benishangul-Gumuz is often illegally smuggled out of Ethiopia including across the porous border into Sudan, where a multibillion-dollar gold trade is sustaining the two-year-long war that has divided the Sudanese state between the Sudanese army and the RSF while displacing more than 15 million people from their homes, according to the UN.
“The [gold] commodity is the most significant source of income for the two main warring parties ... both of which hold very substantial areas of artisanal gold production and, in the case of the army, also industrial gold production areas,” says Soliman. Sudan’s wartime gold industry has embedded itself in regional African economies and supply chains, feeding a cross-border network of governments, armed groups, commodity traders and arms dealers profiting from and fuelling conflict.
According to the US state department, the principal export markets for gold from sub-Saharan Africa are the United Arab Emirates, Switzerland and India. A 2024 report by Swiss Aid estimated that undeclared gold from Africa worth €101 billion ended up in the UAE between 2012 and 2022.
Soliman says that as part of its Vision 2030 strategy, the Emirates has been “expanding and developing [its] interests with both state and non-state actors in East Africa,” viewing gold as a way to diversify the UAE economy and reduce dependency on oil.
