“I think aid is important, and while it works in so many places, it is horribly done in others,” Alsanosi Adam tells me. A delegate of Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs), his organisation presents a radically different approach than traditional humanitarian aid. A grassroots, community-driven initiative dedicated to providing life-saving assistance amid the current civil war in Sudan, Adam’s ambition was to revolutionise the future of aid through dencentralisation.

“Aid is important, and while it works in so many places, it is horribly done in others”

The ERR delegate and award-winning documentary maker is sure that this method “could definitely replace the mainstream humanitarian aid delivery that we are seeing right now, which is crumbling, and has very little impact”. Rather than a formulaic, top-down approach to aid, his work aims to empower communities “to design and implement their own projects”. #

He explains: “Organisations come with knowledge of another country in Africa, with the assumption that this solution will work in this other country because it is Africa”. ERR make use of local and communal knowledge, historically undervalued by technocratic development initiatives, in guiding their work.

They work via collating resources and human capital to help people with specific needs, attending to regional and local disasters – for example, by setting up community kitchens in which everyone can cook and eat together. There are different divisions of social and economic support, such as women’s response rooms, headed by individuals who have the resources to help.

For example, the ERRs’ method is rooted in an old Sudanese culture called nafir. “Nafir is a cultural practice in which everyone comes together to help others, with no need for payment or recompense,” Adam elaborates. “All one must do is pay it forward and help somebody else. […] We see this in disaster management in an island called Tuti in Sudan, where it floods every year.” When that happens, the entire neighbourhood comes together to help those affected. Doctors, soldiers, teachers, and anyone with a useful skillset will all join forces and stay there until the river levels return to normal.

Similarly, in agricultural areas, the concept of nafir necessitates that everyone helps one another with their harvests. Adam affirms: “This culture is very old, and we have built upon it; its structures and ideas.” Because the ERRs are so rooted in local culture and tradition, “there is a lot of potential for them to take on even larger roles in the community, especially in the recovery process, and even in local governance post-war”. Thus, not only does the organisation see nafir as the cornerstone of aid in the context of war, but it is seen as of vital importance for the state re-building and recovery process after the war is over.

“We need to ‘strip the bureaucracies that have been excessively built up over the years’”

More practically, a local-led initiative is far more equipped to deal with emergencies than a large-scale, international bureaucracy. When aid actors are institutionally bound, they are required to continually explain their actions and expenses to higher-ups, which significantly slows down response times. For example, Adam bluntly asserts: “If you need to evacuate, but are forced to first explain this to the organisation, it will take too long, and people will die”. Furthermore, when donors give money via big NGOs or corporations, the money that de facto reaches the ground will be a lot less than the original donation, because of how much goes towards the organisation itself.

“Who is it helping,” Adam asks, “when organisations spend such significant amounts of money on rent, offices, cars, and equipment?” He demanded that organisations “strip the bureaucracies that have been excessively built up over the years: every year there are new compliances, recommendations, regulations – with no actual impact,” and get serious about grassroots strategies. The aid industry, he remarked, has been talking about ‘localisation’ for “ten years, and we haven’t seen any actual progress. But now we have young people, 26,000 volunteers on the ground doing it, and doing it really well. And I think the world might learn a thing or two from it.”

“these atrocities 9have been shared to an extent that is actually taking away people’s ability to critically think”

Adam sought to combat what he viewed as a highly sensationalised presentation of Sudan’s war on social media, powered by the filming and broadcasting of acts of brutality. We discussed one of many unfortunate consequences of digital technologies: that “these atrocities have been shared to an extent that is actually taking away people’s ability to critically think. Nobody thinks about where these videos come from. Nobody questions the motives of whoever has uploaded it.”

For this reason, these videos and the responses they invoke on social media are “playing into a pre-determined agenda”. Many of them are also purposefully misleading. Adam affirms: “We’ve seen videos which claim to depict Sudanese people, which are actually from Somalia or Mali. Not only is this inaccurate, but it desensitises people to the violence and takes away from important issues. The suffering of thousands of people goes to waste.” He urges us to think critically about the violence depicted on social media, and to retain our sensitivity to it.

But technology can be utilised positively, too. The decentralised, localised method of the ERRs relies upon the internet for communication, and upon online banking methods to get funding directly to volunteers on the ground. “This funding is fast, agile, and flexible.”

Making use of social media to spread its message, the Basma Campaign Facebook page offers users a sticker representing the Sudanese struggle. The point of the sticker is to keep Sudan’s story alive. Adam emphasises: “When someone asks you about the sticker, you can tell them about Sudan. And if you want to spread the word, you can give them a sticker, as a reminder of the promise to tell at least one person about what is happening in Sudan, and what needs to be done.”