Ninety-three per cent displaced, most of them to Egypt: what the war did to the students of Khartoum's private medical colleges, including Elrazi University

Elrazi University is a private university in Khartoum with a medical faculty listed in the World Directory of Medical Schools. Its page is among the most searched Sudanese entries on this site, and the searches come largely from outside Sudan. Whoever is searching needs the context that a directory entry does not carry.

A study published in BMC Medical Education in 2025, surveying Sudanese medical and paramedical students, found that 93.1 per cent had been displaced by the war that began in April 2023. The largest share, 45 per cent, had gone to Egypt, followed by Saudi Arabia at 27 per cent and the United Arab Emirates at 10 per cent. The Rift Valley Institute's 2024 research on displacement described a higher-education sector in which roughly 120 public and private universities and colleges, most of them in Khartoum state and enrolling close to half a million students, had suffered near-total infrastructure damage. The Christian Science Monitor reported what continuing abroad costs: students of Ahfad University who transferred to an academy in Egypt found tuition around fifty times what they had paid at home, and Sudanese medical students in Cairo had to raise significant sums by mid-2024 simply to stay enrolled.

Elrazi is not accused of anything here. It is a private institution whose campus is in a city that was a battlefield for two years, and whose students were scattered with everyone else's. The case exists because private colleges in Khartoum kept a market value abroad even while their campuses were closed: an admission letter, a fee schedule and a World Directory listing are all still real documents, and each of them can be sold by an agent to a family that has no way of seeing the campus.

Before paying for a seat at any Khartoum college, ask the college, from an official email address, where its medical students are physically taught this academic year and where they do clinical rotations, and under what agreement with any host institution. Ask your own regulator whether training delivered outside the licensed campus, or online, will be accepted for the degree. If the answers are not in writing, the seat is not what it is being sold as. The Sudanese students who lost their homes, campuses and years are owed honesty about that, and so are the families being offered their places.