At the annual gathering of the United Nations General Assembly last week, when the subject was briefly Sudan, the U.S. ambassador opened her remarks by citing “compassion collapse,” defined as the human tendency to turn away from mass suffering. The suffering in Sudan is certainly on a mass scale. Eleven million people have fled their homes, pursued by men with guns and followed by famine. More than half of the country’s population of 46 million is experiencing acute hunger, and three-quarters of a million people face starvation. Sudan is the worst humanitarian situation in the world, and with the international appeal for funds short by 60 percent, governments are not rising to it.
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But people are. On the Sudanese border a few days ago, I saw volunteers doing more with next to nothing than those who have the ability to make the biggest impact. Hafiz Issak Aroun, a Chadian doctor, had resigned his job at a hospital to set up a clinic in the border town of Adré, treating refugees for free. “We are all volunteers here,” he said, “and we’re desperate for support to keep this going.”
Neighbors bring food and volunteer farmland. In Khartoum, neighborhood mutual-aid groups known as Emergency Response Rooms operate 350 communal kitchens. They know the value of living a life of service and grace, of adding to the lives of those around you.
Local responders do not see mass suffering but rather the needs of the person in front of them. Local volunteers, who include refugees themselves, are doing the work that the outside world says should be done, and often better than any outsider could. But they struggle to do it without the support that wealthier countries can provide—in funds free of red tape, through reliable communications, with the diplomatic pressure essential to protecting humanitarian workers, and by keeping open the portals through which aid moves.
We need to adjust. Research shows that local groups are faster and more efficient in getting aid to those who need it. To make this happen, donors and relief agencies need to change the way they do business. The shift will need to be dramatic and draw on lessons and models for financing in sectors like global public health.
It’s not just Sudan. In country after country, I have seen the current international system fail people in need. I could no longer tell people to look only to the international community as the answer. I wanted to learn more about what was blocking refugees and the internally displaced from helping themselves. One answer is funding; mutual aid groups this year have only received about 5% of resources allocated from the $130 million Sudan Humanitarian Pooled Fund. Eight years ago, a humanitarian ‘Grand Bargain’ set a target of directing, by 2020, at least a quarter of all international humanitarian assistance through local and national actors. In 2022, it was less than three percent.
Behind the question of money is another question, of respect.
I have lived a privileged life, walked in many worlds. I have worked alongside heads of state, collaborated with great artists, met with kings and queens. The people I have been most humbled by, the people I’ve learned the most from, were displaced families fleeing war and persecution. No one knows better, or has more grace, than the person who has survived the loss of family and country. They are who I hold in highest esteem. No one knows what it is to be stripped of everything and take that next step forward more than a refugee.
On the border of Sudan, where 200 people cross every day, I found myself standing face to face with a mother who had just walked two weeks with a baby on her back and three young children at her feet. Their father had been murdered in their home, which was then looted and burnt to the ground. That mother was still smiling at her child. To give him some light in the dark. She will live every moment trying to ease her children’s suffering and yet offered to pray for my children to have health—and she meant it. I can’t tell you now how many times I’ve sat in a tent and been offered part of that very small ration a family was storing. It’s not about the food, it’s their common decency. Prayers for the health of a person’s family are among the sincerest gifts we can give one another.
Our task must be to make that gift possible—first by funding and enabling local responders. After visiting the border, I met with The Mutual Aid Sudan Coalition, which matches funding to the needs of local aid groups, rather than asking those groups to adapt to a global relief apparatus. But they must be able to save lives without risking their own. Not long ago, the killing of humanitarian workers produced outraged headlines. It has grown almost routine because it has been allowed to; neither states nor armed groups expect to face consequences. When justice is not served equally and without exceptions, it is not justice.
High-minded statements are just words if no one acts on them. The U.N. was founded to prevent war. When it fails at that, an international system that cannot even tend to those fleeing a conflict must, at a bare minimum, protect the local people who do step up. It’s happening not only on Chad’s overwhelmed border with Sudan, but in conflict zones across the world—anywhere that social solidarity summons the spirit Sudanese call nafeer, “collective action.” We can marvel at what they do with almost nothing. Or we can step up and make necessary changes to how we respond.
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