Sudan’s wartime currency market is showing growing signs of fragmentation, with the dollar trading at sharply different levels between army-held areas and Nyala, the main city under Rapid Support Forces control.
Currency traders said the dollar was changing hands at around 4,700 Sudanese pounds in the parallel markets of Khartoum and Port Sudan over the past week, after earlier reports of extreme volatility and short-lived panic pricing.
But in Nyala, the capital of South Darfur and a key logistics centre for the RSF, traders told Darfur24 that the dollar remained far lower, at around 3,600 pounds for buying and 3,555 for selling.
The Bankak app, operated by Bank of Khartoum, showed another rate altogether, with the dollar hovering around 4,250 pounds.
The gap points to a currency system no longer functioning as a single national market. Instead, Sudan’s exchange rate is increasingly shaped by local liquidity, banking access, cash shortages, trade routes and the authority controlling each area.
The divergence also complicates recent reports that placed the dollar near 6,000 pounds. Those figures appeared during a period of severe volatility and hard-currency shortages, but newer market reporting suggests the rate now varies widely by city and by payment method.
For ordinary Sudanese, the practical result is the same: prices continue to rise, salaries keep losing value and basic goods are increasingly priced according to a fragmented wartime economy rather than a unified national exchange rate.
