South Sudan Displacement Crisis: Renk Port and Road Monitoring - Renk County, Upper Nile State, South Sudan (October 2018)

Context and Methodology

Renk Town is located in Renk County, Upper Nile State, near South Sudan’s border with Sudan. Since independance in 2011, Renk has been a major destination and transit point for returnees from Sudan and, since the beginning of the current conflict in 2013, for internally displaced persons (IDPs) fleeing conflict in Upper Nile State.

REACH monitors three transit sites in Renk Town, two road points (Sukjima and Zero bus stations) and one port (Renk Port), to record all the arrivals and departures on a daily basis. Respondents were selected based on pre-survey questions on motives of travel to ensure that only displaced people or returnees were interviewed. Data is collected at household (HH) level on HH demographics and vulnerabilities, transportation routes, key push/pull factors and intentions. Data collected daily is then synthesized into a monthly factsheet to provide humanitarian actors with an overview of wider movement trends. Due to Sudan’s closure of the Joba border entrance into South Sudan in March 2018, returnees increasingly cross at informal border sites at night, after data collection hours (9:00 a.m - 5:00 p.m). Further, not all entry points to Renk Town were covered systematically. As such, the data presented in this factsheet is not representative, rather indicative of movement trends for the assessed population.

The following findings are based on primary data collected throughout October 2018, during which 58 departing HHs (176 individuals), 25 arriving HHs (84 individuals) and 75 transiting HHs (248 individuals) were recorded at the three sites. Arrivals are mostly partial households (73% of all interviewed HHs in October 2018) as family members await the last of the annual planned food distributions in their current settlements and verification of security conditions in possible sites of relocation.

FULL REPORT (PDF)