Chadians move to southeastern areas into Sudan looking for food, water and income until the rainy seasons, when they return to their villages and sow their crops.

[7] Since the time Sudan became independent in 1956 from the British and Egyptian condominium, it has experienced 21 years of civil wars between the North and the South.

[8] The war ended with signature of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in 2005, which stipulated the autonomy of South Sudan for six years followed by a referendum of self-determination that took place in January 2011.

In 2003 the conflicts over land and water that had been ongoing in Darfur for decades took the shape of a civil war when the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) announced their existence and started fighting against the Janjaweed, a tribal militia backed by the Sudanese central government that had been attacking and razing villages in Darfur for a number of years.

The Obama administration is pushing towards solving the conflict in Darfur before the independence of South Sudan,[10] although reaching a peace agreement remains unlikely.

[11] Overall, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimated in the end of 2010 that between 1.2 and 1.7 million Sudanese live abroad, and that neighboring countries were hosting more than half of them.

[12] Chad hosts the largest community of Sudanese refugees, approximately 262,900 by the beginning of 2011, of whom 248,700 are assisted by the UNHCR in camps located along the Chad–Sudan border.

For years now refugees and international organization have reported thousands of human trafficking cases in the camps, where boys between the age of nine and fifteen are being recruited, forcibly or willingly, by Chadian and Sudanese armed groups.

[16] UNICEF is putting a great effort on dealing with this problem, and from 2007 to 2010 it had demobilized more than 800 child soldiers, most of whom had been recruited into Chadian rebel groups.

[13] Children in the Chadian refugee camps are also vulnerable to gender-based violence, sexual harassment, prostitution and early marriage.

At the beginning of 2011 UNHCR placed as a priority in this area the completion of boreholes and the installation of manual pumps in order to reduce dependency on electrical equipment.