Feature
Mansour Gaily’s sweets factory in Khartoum, Sudan, is making sweets again. According to a report Al Jazeera published on Wednesday, it is running at 40% of its pre-war capacity, and Mr Gaily put his losses at about $1 million. “We are operating at 40 percent of our production capacity because the damage was severe and capital is limited,” he told the outlet.
What he says a restart needs is a chain: sesame and sugar, packaging, spare parts, electricity and workers, with a gap in any link stopping the line. Sudan’s war broke many links at once, and they must be paid for before the first sale. Al Jazeera reported that firms which lost machinery, stock and income often lack the capital to replace equipment and pay for stock and staff before revenue returns.
The World Bank’s October Macro Poverty Outlook describes a fragile, partial recovery, dependent on how the conflict develops, after Sudan’s economy lost about 40% of its output cumulatively in 2023–24. The same report shows why imports weigh on manufacturers: the Sudanese pound lost about 48% of its value between December 2025 and the end of July 2026, amid rising fuel-import costs and supply disruptions, which the Bank says raised the cost of imported goods. It covers the whole economy, not Mr Gaily’s factory, but Al Jazeera reported that some manufacturers now have to import materials that were previously available locally, which exposes them to that exchange rate.
A different bottleneck appeared in an April interview with Sudan Tribune. Atif Abdel Qader, a leader of the Sudanese Industrial Chambers Union and owner of a steel plant that had just resumed production, listed import forms for spare parts, difficulty obtaining certificates of origin, high port storage fees and scarce raw materials, and asked the central bank to exempt registered factories. That is one industry representative’s account, six months old, but it points to delay created by rules and ports rather than by destroyed machinery.
Restarting does not automatically make goods cheaper. A shopkeeper in Bahri Central Market in the Khartoum area told Al Jazeera that imported products are sometimes cheaper for traders and shoppers, though many customers prefer Sudanese-made ones; one consumer said both local and imported prices are high and change daily. That is the tension in the restart: the money to produce is scarce, and what a factory makes must compete with imports that are sometimes cheaper.