The following is the transcript of the interview with former Save the Children President and CEO Janti Soeripto that aired on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” on May 10, 2026.
MARGARET BRENNAN: We turn now to Janti Soeripto, she is the president and CEO of Save the Children U.S., which works to provide humanitarian aid and health resources to children worldwide. Good to have you here on this Mother’s Day.
JANTI SOERIPTO: Thank you, Margaret and Happy Mother’s Day.
MARGARET BRENNAN: You’re just back from Sudan, which is one of the hardest places in the world to be a parent, certainly to be a mother. Pope Leo called it an inhumane tragedy. The UN says 34 million people need urgent assistance. I know the US is trying to work on a humanitarian ceasefire, but tell me what you saw there on the ground.
JANTI SOERIPTO: Well Margaret, it is truly the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, millions of people in need, and probably also the one that gets the least attention relative to the need. It literally took me four days to actually get from here to see the first school that we are supporting there. So, the level of logistical and operational impediments to actually get support to children and mothers where they are is unbelievably difficult. You have to cross multiple lines of various militant groups. It is truly, truly the last mile and- and the scale of the need is- is really astonishing. I see a lot of emergency situations across the world, I see a lot of fragile states, but this was really right up there.
MARGARET BRENNAN: I know the U.S. has said this is essentially a proxy fight now, but when you look at the humanitarian need, some of the statistics that were flooring to me here was the degree of sexual violence.
JANTI SOERIPTO: Yeah.
MARGARET BRENNAN: It is systematically used as a tactic of war, according to the UN. 13 million people, mostly women and girls, require support, according to the UN, related to that kind of violence. That’s four times higher than before the conflict. Doctors Without Borders said the war is being ‘fought on the backs and bodies of women and girls,’ but they fault aid groups for not doing enough. Do you think aid groups are?
JANTI SOERIPTO: We’re doing what we can, but I would certainly agree that it is not enough. We simply do not have the resources. And I would agree. What I- what I heard there, and that is just a tiny tip of the iceberg, was completely, you know, unbelievable. Our colleagues there, we have about 150 colleagues in Darfur, which is the area where I was, all of those have lost their home. They are displaced themselves. They have lost their homes. Most of them came from El Fasher, where a lot of the violence occurred last October. I spoke to a colleague of mine who had to walk with her 16-year-old daughter. The daughter was threatened. She fought. I mean, I saw the scars on her face. She fought to- to help her daughter, to keep her daughter alive and safe, and then she did get out and was essentially rescued by- by somebody. So this one had a somewhat happy ending, but so, so many don’t have that, and you see it in the eyes of the women that I spoke to. You know, they walked for days without sleep, just trying to keep themselves and their families alive. Most of the households in the north of Darfur, where I was, where there are 700,000 displaced people in one stretch of desert, the vast majority of those households are women-led households. The men are either- have either been killed or have disappeared or-or have joined the fighting groups. So these women are literally doing everything they can to keep their families and themselves alive.
MARGARET BRENNAN: There’s a lot of humanitarian aid that’s stuck in that strait of Hormuz right now because of the war in Iran. How significant is the impact on the ability to give goods to those who need it?
JANTI SOERIPTO: Yeah, it is truly what we say. You know, this is another element of the example of the cost of war, right? There is a human cost. And then there’s the financial costs, which also lead to human costs. We have currently about a half million stocks still stuck in Dubai that we can’t get out, medicine, drugs. Costs of transport have gone up, as you hear everywhere. So, you know, the Plumpy’nut treatment for malnutrition for young infants and children who are minors is now, what is it? 12 to 15% more expensive than it was before- before the war. So- and it takes longer to get there, because we have to find alternative routes in order- you know- versus the direct route we had. So, yes, it makes it harder, and our supply chain teams have already- who have to be incredibly creative and adaptive all the time because the logistics in the country are also incredibly difficult to get authorization, to- I mean, the tarmac road ended an hour after- from the border in western Darfur. So from then on in, it is essentially a very, very rocky road. So to get stuff there, even physically, is- it takes days and sometimes weeks.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Let me ask you about the Middle East. The White House says there is ‘tremendous progress’ on implementing President Trump’s 20-point peace plan in Gaza. I know you and a number of other organizations said, six months into the Gaza ceasefire, the plan is failing. Those are two incredibly different accounts of what’s happening on the ground. What is happening on the ground?
JANTI SOERIPTO: So we’ve taken the 20-point plan and- and we literally looked at, okay, so what are we seeing on the ground? So we took the data, our own staff accounts of what they were witnessing, publicly available data from the UN and others, to say, okay, so is there less violence? Is there access, unfettered access, for supplies and for staff? And- and we scored them accordingly. We’ve published a methodology, and we stand by those, by those facts as we see them. There is still- we- we have 200 staff in Gaza who do heroic work every day.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Yeah.
JANTI SOERIPTO: It is incredibly difficult for us to get supplies in. We cannot get staff in and rotate it so, no that- that plan, as it stands, is- is not working.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Janti Soeripto, thank you for the work you are doing. We’ll be right back.