KHARTOUM (Reuters) -In the heart of Khartoum state’s largest industrial zone, an engineer bends over a broken machine with a pair of pliers and a bunch of wires, trying to breathe life back into a production line wrecked by more than two years of war.
People who fled when the conflict erupted in 2023 started to return this year after Sudan’s army retook the capital from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. While fighting rages on in other areas, some businesses have begun picking up the pieces.
“This factory made electrical products with all the components,” manager Asim Alamin said as he watched the repair work in the CTC Group plant in Bahri, part of the greater capital.
“Now we are rehabilitating it. Hopefully we will return to what it was before.”
MAJOR LOSSES
On top of the repairs, businesses are facing a huge clear-up operation.
Across the capital, factories and warehouses are littered with twisted metal and rubble, lit by shafts of light from holes left by shells and looters in ceilings and windows.
In the Bahri plant, the head of a broom lay next to the tools on the production line.
Sudan’s economy, already struggling before the conflict, collapsed after fighting broke out. Its GDP contracted 29% the year the war started and 13.5% in 2024, according to World Bank data.
Though more than one million people have returned to Khartoum, according to the UN, reviving the market for domestic goods, water and power grids are still out of service.
“Our manufacturing complex suffered heavy damage – buildings, electrical systems and vital equipment were looted or destroyed,” CTC Group, which is also Sudan’s largest agricultural supplier, said in a statement to Reuters.
“Before the end of this year, we expect to see our production lines running once more,” it added.
The Sudanese currency has lost more than 80% of its value during the conflict, and the government has struggled to collect revenue to pay employees and buy necessary supplies like medicine.
Sudan’s all-important agricultural sector was hobbled and its gold was increasingly smuggled out, bypassing duties.
“Right now, the number of factories that have returned to work is relatively small,” said Moawia Elbereir, head of Sudan’s business union, who put the losses for the industrial sector at $50 billion.
“The biggest obstacle to restarting the rest of the industrial areas is electricity, fuel prices and new fees levied on us,” he added, speaking at his food and beverages factory.
The collapse of the economy was most acutely felt by the more than half of the population now in need of humanitarian assistance.
Factory worker Safaa Adam said she and her family were left penniless after the war started.
“We lived in circumstances we would have never imagined. We ate expired food, and sometimes couldn’t find that,” she said.
She fled the fighting, then returned and found work. “Once again I have a steady income.”
(Additional reporting by Khalid Abdelaziz; Writing by Nafisa Eltahir; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
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