The crisis in Sudan and the ongoing humanitarian response is an epicentre for the tensions, opportunities, challenges and successes related to a shift away from an internationally dominated aid system to something more locally led. This is perhaps no more evident than with the Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs), twice nominated (and twice passed over, in 2024 and 2025) for a Nobel prize. Their dynamic shoestring operations were seemingly no match for the multi-billion-dollar World Food Programme – a Nobel winner in 2020. And ‘the local’ in Sudan is, in any case, much more than ERRs.

Against this background, ODI Global and its Humanitarian Policy Group (HPG) have embarked on a three-year research and influencing programme to critically engage with the power, pitfalls and possibilities of locally led crisis response in Sudan. This also means critically assessing our role as a Global North-based institution producing knowledge that can often reverberate around an echo chamber or inadvertently reinforce inequitable power structures. Partnering with the exceptional organisation Shabaka and focusing on iterative co-design, we hope to explore critical issues in a way that is thoughtful and intentional about how we do research and influencing. The rest of this blog sets out five reasons why we’re focusing on locally led crisis response in Sudan.

1. Money flows are more important than words

It’s not just cratering aid budgets that are exacerbating hardship in Sudan, but also how money flows (or not). Significant attention is paid to the lack of humanitarian funding that reaches local and national actors in the country. Refugees International reports that, in 2024, only 1% of the Sudan Humanitarian Fund (SHF) – the pooled fund of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) – went directly to local and national actors, the lowest proportion of any OCHA fund globally for that year. This is starker still given the SHF was OCHA’s largest fund globally in 2024, disbursing $181 million. The United States’ co-option of pooled funds has cemented international dominance for 2026.

Like other countries grappling with contested governance and high-intensity violence, Sudan also faces a range of challenges around accessing physical cash. Cash is hard to obtain and exchange rate inconsistencies can eviscerate foreign currency value by the time it reaches communities. Extensive sanction regimes compound the problems, such as banks avoiding payment transfers for fear of breaching sanctions. Authorities and donors are pressuring local and national actors to register to receive funding, despite the security and other risks registration can pose. These difficulties are not uniform; our scoping research with Shabaka identified how organisation type and geographic location impact funding access. It’s also not just about the volume of funding, but its quality. The short timeframes and strict conditionalities attached to the billions of dollars in US funding channelled through OCHA’s pooled funds raise significant questions about aid quality and impact.

We will critically examine financing issues and funding flows in Sudan, as the lynchpin for locally led action. We recognise that the volume of remittances and other diaspora funding is significantly higher than the formal aid system; how then might aid be made more complementary and coherent? Considering the widespread praise for mutual aid in Sudan, another central question is how funding can work better for local and national Sudanese organisations, formal and informal, doing the heavy lifting of the response. This is about much more than numbers.

2. Political crisis, yet a humanitarian framing

Sudan is facing a humanitarian catastrophe, but the crisis behind it is political in origin, and the response is being shaped by political choices – international as much as domestic. Building on existing HPG work on rights and relief, and oppression and liberation, we are concerned that, when a crisis is read as primarily humanitarian, this narrows the contours of the response, obscures the conditions producing need and defers questions of justice and accountability to a moment that never quite arrives. Under the auspices of neutrality, humanitarianism has long had an uneasy relationship with the political and social formations working alongside it: a relationship that can, in practice, reduce those formations to whatever function the international response most needs from them. In Sudan, that function is currently service delivery. Other framings can be equally reductive.

Such tensions are not new. Hala Al-Karib argued in 2018 that international aid had NGO-ised and thus depoliticised women’s movements in Sudan, reshaping their agenda around donor priorities rather than the political questions they had been addressing. The scale of the current crisis and the funding architecture around it have only sharpened those dynamics. There is a familiar humanitarian instinct that immediate need takes priority, and everything else can wait.

As Sharath Srinivasan sets out, deferring deeper political questions leaves too many of them unresolved, fuelling the next round of violence. Peace, justice and accountability cannot be sequenced behind humanitarian delivery; the terms on which response is offered now shape what’s possible later.

For our programme, this raises two related questions. How does international aid meet the scale of need in Sudan without narrowing complex community formations – plural, differentiated, carrying their own histories and priorities – into a single legible function? How are the political conditions producing the crisis engaged, rather than treated as the backdrop to a humanitarian response that seeks to remain above them? We understand that many humanitarian actors may consider the second question outside their remit. We are not so sure.

3. Exploring mutual aid beyond ERRs

ERRs have become the most visible and widely recognised local actors in Sudan, and their rise to global prominence is understandable. They come from within the communities they serve, operate autonomously across the country, can reach areas inaccessible to many international actors, share knowledge and mentorship across networks and remain accountable to one another, rather than being primarily oriented towards the international aid system. They are a striking example of what bottom-up crisis response can look like. But they are not the only one. Sudan has a long tradition of social support networks. These networks form the backbone of civil society and are deeply rooted in cultural norms – faith-based institutions, women-led organisations, youth groups, professional bodies and long-established civil society organisations, alongside more recent mobilisations. Many of these actors are flexible, trusted locally and turned to during periods of crisis. They are also routinely overlooked, and recently overshadowed, in both attention and funding.

If the international system is serious about supporting locally led action in Sudan, it needs to engage with more than just the most visible and celebrated actors. Concentration of attention on one set risks leaving them more exposed, carrying expectations, funding cycles and international visibility they did not ask for and cannot easily control. It also leaves the wider ecosystem under-supported. When the system leans this heavily on a single model, both the model and the response become more fragile.

Concentration can also flatten what is a plural ecosystem. It can marginalise alternative locally led models and encourage homogenisation rather than diversity. It can replicate a broader trend of the ‘NGOisation’ of mutual aid and local action, whereby civil society actors are pressured to reshape themselves around donor compliance requirements, reporting systems and external agendas to maintain access to funds. In the process, local actors risk losing the flexibility that makes their work effective, while organisations already better connected to international systems become further privileged. And it creates its own perverse incentives, including other groups presenting themselves as mutual aid to access funds routed that way.

For our programme, the questions are practical. Where is the wider Sudanese ecosystem in the current response, and where has it been pushed out of view? What forms of support can strengthen plurality rather than concentrating it? How does the international system engage with the actors it celebrates, without inadvertently making them more brittle?

4. Connections between extreme violence and climate breakdown

Sudan is one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries, and climate stress interacts with conflict in complex ways. Rising temperatures, environmental degradation, livelihood collapse, displacement, resource competition and weak governance all form part of a broader crisis landscape in which climate shocks can deepen existing vulnerabilities and conflict can erode communities’ ability to adapt. The speed and severity of the climate crisis are also deepening food insecurity and poverty. Yet climate is rarely treated as a central component of Sudan’s crisis. Rather, it is a secondary concern to be addressed once the fighting ends.

The war has generated significant environmental consequences, but these receive comparatively little attention, particularly when focusing on locally led crisis response. Environmental degradation is often treated as a future concern, despite being shaped by decisions made now. This raises broader questions about locally led recovery and peacebuilding. Can environmental issues realistically be addressed after a political settlement is reached, or must they be integrated from the outset? What about the intersections with the predatory capitalism that exacerbates armed conflict and environmental collapse?

There is also an uncomfortable question for the international aid sector itself: to what extent does the humanitarian response contribute to environmental pressures in contexts such as Sudan, where climate and conflict intersect? Aid programming may contribute to environmental degradation, such as unsustainable water and sanitation programming, or the generation of large amounts of non-biodegradable pollution. The carbon footprint of international assistance is significant. Can locally led response present a more environmentally sound model?

5. The last mile of humanitarian delivery is critical

A final area we believe requires greater attention is the last mile of humanitarian delivery, which can get lost in discussions about the aid architecture and system reform. In particular, how is assistance reaching the most at-risk and inaccessible populations, if at all? What are the experiences and perceptions of the people involved in that last mile of delivery?

Mutual aid groups and other local actors are often tasked with operating in the most difficult and insecure locations because international agencies simply won’t work there. This can create a perception of ‘localisation’, as seen with mutual aid in Sudan, but this is out of necessity, rather than supporting locally led action out of genuine commitment and solidarity. Unpacking and addressing these questions matters if we seek a more equitable humanitarian system that does more than simply transfer risk.