Floods caused by torrential monsoon rains mostly outside the country in neighbouring Ethiopia raised the Nile River by 17.5 metres (57 ft) in late August, the highest level it has reached in nearly a century, according to the Sudanese Ministry of Irrigation.

[1] Some experts, such as International Rivers, expect climate change to cause periodic bouts of drought and flooding in the future.

[10] The National Flood Mission Forces of the Humanitarian Aid Committee began, and Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok confirmed that "the levels of the Nile and its tributaries this year, according to the Ministry of Irrigation and Water Resources, have been unprecedented since 1912."

The Sudanese Security and Defense Council declared a state of emergency throughout the country for a period of three months and has decided to consider Sudan a natural disaster area.

Teams have organized sandbag walls and are pumping water out of the area in order to avoid damage to the ruins of Al-Bajrawiya, formerly an ancient city of the two-thousand-year-old Meroitic empire and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

[14] The United Nations has increased food aid to the country while hundreds of thousands of Sudanese have been forced to live in desperate makeshift camps.

[15] In September 2020, Sudanese Economic Minister Hiba Mohamed Ali said that the government had dedicated $6.15 million to help alleviate victims of the floods.

Women from some of the nearly 600,000 affected agricultural households told the FAO they were cutting down to one small meal per day after their sorghum was washed away just before harvest.

The United Nations estimates that 9.6 million people face acute food insecurity in Sudan, the highest number on record.