War shut down Sudan’s universities. But its students refused to give up.

The GoFundMe page was Braah Alrashid and Hibatallah Suleiman’s last chance.

It was the end of July 2024, and the two best friends from Sudan had a month to come up with $15,000 to continue medical school in Egypt.

Once, they would have simply asked their families. Ms. Alrashid’s parents, for instance, made a good living as landlords for several rental properties. When she started medical school in Sudan in 2017, her father gave her a car to drive to classes.

But the civil war that broke out in April 2023 turned that easy life upside down. Both Ms. Alrashid’s family and Ms. Suleiman’s had to flee to Egypt. “We lost everything — our homes, our land, our loved ones, and most sorrowfully, our dreams,” the women wrote on their fundraiser page.

More generally, the war has dealt Sudan’s higher education system a catastrophic blow. Universities have been regularly attacked, looted, and even converted into military bases. This has forced many Sudanese university students to abandon their education. But some, like Ms. Alrashid and Ms. Suleiman, have found ways to continue it abroad.

Today, thousands of uprooted Sudanese students are enrolled in universities from neighboring Egypt to as far away as Malaysia. But for many, the experience has been bittersweet. These young people welcome the chance to continue studying, but it also often comes at a high price, both financially and emotionally.

Sitting in a Cairo dorm room, Ms. Alrashid and Ms. Suleiman were out of choices. Ms. Alrashid hit the publish button on the GoFundMe page, then immediately began tapping restlessly on the reload button, waiting for a donation to appear.

Courtesy of Braah Alrashid

Braah Alrashid attends a medical conference in Khartoum, Sudan, Feb. 25, 2023.

No future in Sudan

Even before the civil war, Sudan’s universities were overcrowded and underfunded. But the war between two factions of Sudan’s military has made things vastly worse. In the first four months of fighting alone, around 100 universities and research centers were damaged or vandalized, according to Sudan’s Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research. In the capital, Khartoum, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group, hijacked one university campus and turned it into barracks for its soldiers.

Hussam Ibrahim was six months from finishing his degree in accounting at the University of Science and Applied Studies in Khartoum when the war began. Because other schools in the city were being attacked, the university decided to close its doors.

A few months later, it tried to pick back up by offering classes online. By then, however, both sides in the conflict were using internet blackouts and power outages as weapons of war. So Mr. Ibrahim and his classmates often couldn’t even log on to attend their lectures.

That led him to a painful decision. “I didn’t think I had a future in Sudan,” says Mr. Ibrahim, who decided instead to enroll at a private university in Kampala, Uganda, called Cavendish.

He arranged that transfer on his own, persuading the university to take him on the basis of a few grainy cellphone photos of his exam results, since his shuttered Sudanese university couldn’t provide a transcript.

But many Sudanese students who have gone abroad have done so through partnerships between their universities and institutions in other countries. For instance, in 2023, the Khartoum-based University of Medical Sciences and Technology (UMST) sent about 300 medical students to the University of Rwanda.

“We chose Rwanda because it has shown the world how to heal their wounds, and this is important for people who are now wounded and in a war, like people from Sudan,” says Mamoun Homeida, chairman of the board of trustees at UMST, in an interview with The New Times Rwanda.

A difficult transition

Still, the transitions have not always been easy. “Back in Sudan, we had lectures in English, but if you didn’t understand something, you could ask the lecturers to explain in Arabic,” says Fatima Abdulrahman, a fourth-year dental student from UMST now studying in Rwanda. “Here, you’re on your own,” she says.

Ms. Abdulrahman has also struggled outside the classroom. She didn’t know which local dishes contained pork, which she is forbidden to eat under Islamic law. And at Rwandan markets, she was shocked when male vendors grabbed her hands to get her attention. “In Sudan, males and females had boundaries, but it’s not like that here,” she says. While she finds the people easygoing and loves the rainy weather, she plans to return home after the conflict ends. “This war has tested me, but I’ll go back without a doubt.”

In Saudi Arabia, Sara Amir lived with friends from school but often felt homesick. “I was happy to continue studying, but thinking about my father in Khartoum made me very sad,” says Ms. Amir, who graduated from medical school last year.

After she finished her degree, she planned to return home and practice as a doctor in Sudan. Then, RSF fighters killed her uncle, and she realized she would have to stay in Saudi Arabia. “We can’t afford to lose anyone again,” she says.

With so many doctors leaving the country, “the health sector will suffer too,” says Elwaleed Elamin, former director at Sudan’s Alzaiem Alazhari University. That will exacerbate the country’s already massive medical brain drain – since the 1960s, nearly 60% of its physicians have left the country.

“Sudan is not stable... That’s why people are leaving,” says Rawan Khalid, a first-year pharmacy student at Zagazig University in Egypt. She was close to finishing her degree in Sudan when the war broke out. “Now I’m 22 and starting afresh,” she says.

Meanwhile, many students have faced increased costs studying abroad.

In Sudan, for instance, Ms. Alrashid and Ms. Suleiman paid about $100 a semester at Ahfad University for Women. The university helped them transfer to the Arab Academy for Science, Technology, and Maritime Transport in Egypt, but tuition there was 50 times as high.

So they put together the GoFundMe page, which they called “Help Two Sudanese Students Finish Medical School.”

And soon, the donations poured in. “Caribbeans, Germans, Serbians... they saw our posts and offered to help,” Ms. Alrashid recalls.

Eventually, she and Ms. Suleiman raised enough to pay their tuition bill and rent an apartment with three Sudanese classmates. Classes began in mid-December.

Ms. Alrashid says she is overjoyed to return to the simple routines of being a student, like preparing her morning cup of coffee and taking notes in lecture halls.

“No one realizes how much these things matter until you lose them,” she says. “I lost it, so I know.”

Hiba Ishag contributed reporting from Kampala, Uganda.