Stories

The conflict in Western Sahara – once a Spanish colony – has resulted in five decades of displacement for the Sahrawi people, with an estimated number of about 173 000 refugees living in five isolated camps near Tindouf, in western Algeria.

Since January 2025, Ecuador has been experiencing a prolonged rainy season, causing intense floods and landslides. The western provinces of Manabí, Guayas, El Oro, Los Ríos, and Esmeraldas have been particularly affected.

When Dr Bassil Al Eleh heard the sound of bombing on the morning of 7 October 2023, he couldn’t have predicted the scale of devastation that would unfold over the coming months. The northern Gaza Strip, where he lived, soon became a focal point of relentless attacks.

To combat the disease, the EU and its humanitarian partners train local health workers to identify and treat possible malaria cases, as well as educating communities on how to protect themselves.

This is the story of Happy and Goodness. When Happy was abducted from her village in northern Nigeria in May 2024, Goodness was not yet born.

Since 2016, Burkina Faso has been engulfed in an unprecedented security crisis, triggering a devastating humanitarian situation. Once known for its rich cultural heritage and resilient communities, the country is now at the epicentre of a multifaceted crisis.

Over 16 months of war devastated the Gaza Strip. What was once a place with resourceful people struggling with many challenges and under Israeli blockade, is now a grim landscape of rubble, tents, and overcrowded, bullet-riddled makeshift shelters.

2 years into Sudan’s brutal war, 15 million people - 1 in 3 Sudanese - are displaced, including nearly 4 million who fled to neighbouring countries.

The sun had just risen above the palm trees when armed men emerged from the bush and entered Quiterajo, a small coastal town in Mozambique’s northern Cabo Delgado province.

On World Health Day, the European Union reaffirms its steadfast commitment to health in humanitarian settings and fragile regions such as Cameroon's North-West.

In Southern Africa, the United Nations’ Humanitarian Air Service is, quite simply, a lifeline. “UNHAS is more than an air service, it is a lifeline,” says Mamadou Mbaye, Country Director for the World Food Programme (WFP) in Madagascar.

The sound of water flowing from a tap should be ordinary, not a luxury. Nevertheless, for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, such a familiar everyday thing as water in their own homes has become a reminder of a past that did not have a war.

In the heart of Aby-Adi, a town in Ethiopia’s Tigray Region, which was affected by conflict between 2020 and 2022, 48-year-old Birzaf Gebreabezg’s stood out among the crowd.

Since the Sudan conflict began in April 2023, millions have faced immense hardship. Through EU-funded IRC programmes, Dr. Mogahed Ilkeet, delivers life-saving care at the Tunaydbah camp in Sudan, near the Ethiopian border.

The Darien Gap, the only overland link between South and Central America, spans more than 60 miles of swamps, dense rainforest, rushing rivers, and rugged mountains. This extraordinary yet treacherous jungle is among the most dangerous migration routes in the world.

Civilians in northern Mali are caught in the crossfire of an escalating conflict. Often wrongly associated with non-state armed groups, they bear the brunt of retaliatory attacks, with violations perpetrated by all parties to the conflict, and suffer from the absence of basic services.

Halyna’s daughter Sofiia was born with short bowel syndrome and oesophageal atresia, a rare congenital disability that prevents a baby from digesting food because their oesophagus has not formed properly.

Shocked and hungry, families fled to Armenia with whatever they could carry, marking the near-total depopulation of Karabakh's Armenians. As refugees, they now make up 4% of Armenia's population. This conflict left thousands needing shelter, food, health, and psychosocial support.

Across East Africa, millions of displaced people are navigating the hardships of conflict and displacement with resilience and hope. The EU is supporting people in Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda with life-saving cash and nutrition assistance.