Sudan’s Forgotten Cars: A Call for Action

By: Babiker Mohamed
Digital Analyst

Imagine the idea that your stolen car might be just miles away, yet completely out of
reach. Crazy right? Many desperate Sudanese citizens are now relying on scattered
social media posts to track their missing vehicles. While this may be a good initiative,
these efforts are starting to seem disorganized and ineffective. I’ve been trying to
search for a few cars myself on several social media outlets such as Facebook and
Telegram channels. Which are flooded with random cars with blurry details and vague
locations all in the absence of any centralized database system. So I say that to say this,
recovering a stolen car becomes a game of luck rather than a systematic process. We
want a centralized database system which can be used to report stolen and found
vehicles of all types. But we are not just asking for a system, what we also need is
community participation. After years of conflict, many assume nothing can be done,
which is false. There is still hope but it requires a collective effort. People should start
reporting lost and documenting abandoned vehicles in a systematic way. Where people
can share information online of their stolen cars from anywhere in Sudan. The ability to
do that could mean the difference between finding your vehicle intact or getting a
chopped vehicle with spare parts missing, and that’s what’s happening. There is in fact
a big market for stolen vehicles. Stolen vehicles can be used to fund armed groups
through their resale or by ransom. Also not to mention that thieves are able to strip off
these cars for spare parts which can then be difficult to trace. This fundamentally
creates a crisis with a broken system where bad people can take advantage of. While
there are many people out there trying to help others online, the reality is that social
media posts most of the time don’t reach the right people and that requires a lot of
digging which many don’t have time for. Therefore I took the initiative to build my own
database system. An Airtable database where people can report their lost vehicles and
log found vehicles with the necessary details. Let’s be frank this is not magic or
sophisticated, if just 10 people out of 10000 people report stolen vehicles we can at
least find 10 vehicles in the shortest time possible if done effectively. We can’t leave our
cars behind for thieves, which is why I see it as a moral responsibility to aid and help
others in this process.