Insights

Gezira: canals built a state (Arabic)

مشروع ري عمره قرن يفسر كيف تحمل رقعة صغيرة من الأرض ستة ملايين إنسان.

Port Sudan's sudden weight (Arabic)

كانت ولاية البحر الأحمر إقليماً ساحلياً هادئاً، ثم غيّرتها الحرب وتحولات التجارة بسرعة.

Gedaref grows the sorghum that steadies the country

Mechanised rain-fed farming made this eastern state Sudan's grain marketplace.

Blue Nile state is Sudan in miniature

Fifty-plus communities, gold, a giant dam and hard statistics in one small southeastern state.

Sennar, the old kingdom at the grid's edge

A sixteenth-century sultanate's capital is now a mid-sized state where the national power grid was born.

Northern state: a million people in a landscape built for none

Sudan's largest state by area is its emptiest by density, and its most schooled.

White Nile: sugar towns on a slow river

Kenana and Assalaya made the White Nile an industrial corridor before that was fashionable.

Kassala has always been a border town writ large

Wedged against Eritrea, Kassala's three million people live in one of Sudan's most compact, most diverse states.

Why Darfur is five states, and what that means for counting

One historic region, five administrations, nine million people, and some of the country's weakest data.

Port Sudan grew because everything else moved to it

The Red Sea state was a quiet coastal province. War traffic and trade rerouting changed that fast.

Gezira: where the irrigation scheme built a state

A century-old irrigation project explains why a modest patch of land holds six million people.