Mr. David Regan:

The refugee situation is indeed quite astonishing. More than 2 million people have left Sudan. Some of those, as the Deputy said, are returnees. I was in Chad some months ago and there was a population that had gone from Chad to Sudan and they have now returned. They struggle in terms of safety in the refugee camps. It is very unsafe for women and children and more than three quarters of these people are women and children. They struggle to provide them with food and water and basic shelter. That is a huge challenge because the funding available on an international level is not what is needed to provide the very basic support to these refugees in Chad.

There is a similar scenario in South Sudan with people who fled from there to Sudan because of the conflict in South Sudan. They have now returned, along with Sudanese refugees like the lady and her family who I described. The circumstances there are very similar. At the moment, as Ms McKenna alluded to, the rains are particularly heavy there so the flooding is particularly bad. It is a very challenging situation right now for that community. We see the same in the Central African Republic. Fewer people are going to Ethiopia and we also have to recognise that governments like the one in Chad do not have a lot of money and they have actually been hospitable in as far as they can to the refugees. This is worth noting. It is not a situation where they are being pushed back out again. They are doing their best to find ways to accommodate these groups. They know that many of the group that last came from Sudan when the conflict was at its worst 20 years ago are still in Chad. They recognise that they need to integrate these people into the community because, sadly, the way they look at it in Chad is that this situation in Sudan is not going to be resolved quickly and they need to think about what to do with these refugees over the longer term. However, as I said, the numbers are astonishing. Even in the past month, some 100,000 more people have left Sudan to go into Chad, so it is a massive movement of people. We spoke about the 25 million people who are in need of humanitarian support. Where are they going to go? We are looking at a mass movement of people here, as well as the starvation and hunger we alluded to.