As war rages on, new Sudanese group hopes ‘localized’ aid can save lives
Activists and humanitarians who spoke to Al-Monitor said the grassroots initiative is crucial to aid efforts in Sudan due to the localized nature of their response and difficulties international organizations face in the country.
NEW YORK — A new Sudanese aid group has unveiled a mechanism it says will more directly get funds to relief workers on the ground in the war-torn country, an endeavor boosted by a $2 million donation announced on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly last week week.
The Mutual Aid Sudan Coalition, which launched in May, is a collective of organizations that seeks to provide direct funding to local groups responding to Sudan’s humanitarian crisis, including the so-called Emergency Response Rooms. The ERRs are local support groups formed by youth after the start of the civil war that provide aid to civilians, including food, water, evacuation assistance and health care.
The coalition announced on Sept. 23 it will donate at least $2 million to aid groups in Sudan by the end of 2024, and pledged to raise an additional $4.5 million for the groups within the next two years, the Associated Press reported. The announcement was made at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York City.
The Sudanese civil war broke out in April 2023 between the Sudanese armed forces and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) rebels. More than 18,800 have been killed and another 10 million plus have been displaced since the war began, according to UN statistics from earlier this month. The situation is widely described as the largest displacement crisis in the world.
Localizing aid
The Mutual Aid Coalition disburses funds to the emergency response rooms via the Sudanese Localization Coordination Council, a group of Sudanese nongovernmental organizations and the rooms themselves, and the US nonprofit Proximity2Humanity. The process is as follows: Donations are made through Proximity2Humanity, the council determines a disbursement plan, the ERRs submit activity plans and budgets, and Promity2Humanity transfers funds to the ERRs, according to the coalition.
Haitham Elnour, a US-based communications representative for Khartoum’s Sudanese Localization Coordination Council and ERRs, said the rooms are crucial for administering assistance to civilians in the country.
“In the absence of governmental aid, the only thing that is working is the local initiatives,” Elnour told Al-Monitor. “Seventeen months into war and people are still eating. That tells you it’s working.”
Elnour said that the new funding is necessary for the ERRs to continue operating.
“We need this money to maintain people's basic needs,” he said. “What we have now is not even 2% of what we need just to maintain these people’s lives.”
The United Nations reported in February that the ERRs had assisted more than 4 million civilians.
Another factor driving the need for the ERRs is access issues for international organizations due to the violence.
“While the conflict in Sudan continues to spread, humanitarian access has become more limited. Intense violence and movement restrictions on humanitarian actors have prevented the delivery of aid,” the International Rescue Committee said in an August statement.
The Mutual Aid Coalition’s strategy is part of a wider effort to localize humanitarian aid. Josh Balser, a humanitarian working with the coalition, said the ERRs are not funded to the level of other organizations, despite their "demonstrated impact," adding that informal groups like the ERRs "have trouble accessing institutional funding" because they are not traditional nongovernmental organizations. Providing funds to the ERRs directly could serve as a model for best practices to the humanitarian sector, according to him.
“The case in Sudan can be a model for humanitarian aid as a whole. We can achieve our localization goals in practice, not just in words,” Balser told Al-Monitor.
He added that it is important to find ways to support local initiatives like the ERRs due to access and security issues in war zones.
“Whether in Ukraine, Gaza, Syria or Myanmar, the issues are consistently access and security. Local groups start working before international organizations show up,” said Balser. “If we want to localize the response, we need to find a way to support them.”
War rages on
RSF shelling of a market in El-Fasher, located in the war-torn Darfur region of southwest Sudan, killed 18 people on Friday, Agence France-Presse reported.
Efforts to end the war in Sudan were on the agenda during the UN General Assembly. The United States, the European Union, France and Germany held a meeting on Wednesday to discuss the situation.
The states called on the warring parties “to commit, as a first step, to localized humanitarian pauses and ensure immediate humanitarian access to El Fasher, Sennar and Khartoum so that civilians are protected and humanitarian operations can reach those in most dire need of lifesaving assistance,” according to a State Department readout.
They added that “foreign actors” should “refrain from providing military support to the warring parties and to focus their efforts toward building the conditions for a negotiated resolution of the conflict.”
Sudan has accused the United Arab Emirates of backing the RSF, a charge Abu Dhabi denies. The Sudanese armed forces have reportedly used Iranian weapons in the conflict. This has likewise been denied by both Khartoum and Tehran.
