An Origin Story in Three Acts: what Sudan taught me about building in a crisis

24^th April 2026

Bashàïr Ahmed, PhD

I was on a family break when the messages started coming. Easter holidays in the UK, Ramadan still ongoing, and my phone was lighting up with reports of fighting in Khartoum. What began that morning — 15 April 2023 — set in motion three years of work that nobody planned, nearly broke the organisation I had built, and left behind something I believe the humanitarian sector genuinely needs.

This is that origin story. The ending is not where I thought it would be.

Act One: The Pattern We Already Knew

When I heard the news about conflict breaking out on 15 April, my mind did not go to the coups — Sudan has had plenty of those. It went to 2008, when an armed group reached the capital for the first time since the colonial era, and to the warnings that followed for years afterwards. Reports I wrote or contributed to nearly two decades ago could be republished today with updated dates and locations. The patterns repeat. The warnings were there.

Sudan’s history as a crisis had long been shaped by a brutal geography of suffering: conflict and displacement in the peripheries. At the same time, Khartoum functioned — unevenly, unjustly — as a place of relative shelter. 15 April 2023 ended that. This was no longer a periphery war.

Before the fighting began, Shabaka had already been trying to address one of the most persistent structural failures in humanitarian response: the missing bridge between diaspora communities and on-the-ground responders. That is why we built the Switchboard — a technology-enabled platform that connects generations of diaspora actors with mutual aid networks and community-based organisations within Sudan. Funded by USAID, piloted across three diaspora communities, it was designed exactly for moments like this one.

It never launched. But the learning was not wasted.

Act Two: Building Without a Blueprint

Within days of 15 April, the chaos was overwhelming — and the disconnect between the extraordinary community-led response inside Sudan and the international humanitarian system was total. We had no choice but to act.

The Sudan Crisis Coordination Unit (SCCU) was never planned. It had no template, no guaranteed funding, and no institutional safety net. It was built by a small team — Sara Abdelgalil, Sara Abbas, Musab Elhadi, and many others — who threw themselves into something without precedent, while simultaneously helping evacuate their own families and carrying trauma alongside the work.

In the months that followed, nearly a million dollars were brokered to frontline responders. Thirteen reports, mappings, and briefings documented Sudan’s mutual aid infrastructure — Emergency Response Rooms, cash transfer mechanisms, border risks — at a level of detail the formal system could not match. Coordination channels opened between actors who had never been in the same room.

It was supposed to be a three-month pilot.

When the initial funding ended, we kept going — drawing on all of Shabaka’s reserves to extend the SCCU for an additional 3 months. It nearly finished us as an organisation. The demand never stopped; the resources did. Support from partners arrived after we had already shut it down. We tried to find another organisation to take on the mantle. Nobody came forward.

I shudder remembering that period. And I still ask: of the resources directed to Sudan since April 2023, how much has actually stayed in Sudanese hands?

Act Three: What Survives — and Why It Matters

By the end of 2024, the unit was re-established as an independent entity — the Sudan Unit — with its own governance, operational capacity, and registered status in Uganda. That transition is now complete, and I have stepped back from the Advisory Group I chaired from the start. It is the right time.

What survives on Shabaka’s side is the methodology: how to facilitate coordination transnationally, outside the formal system, in real time. Because I do not want another community in crisis to go through what we went through — the scramble, the burnout, the institutional pain of building something from nothing with no roadmap — we created the CCU Global Playbook. It is open-access, practical, and built from operational learning rather than theory. If you are trying to bridge community-led action and institutional systems, it is for you.

The deeper lesson, though, is about knowledge. Sudan’s history is being destroyed in real time — archives bombed, institutions gutted, communities scattered. If we do not capture what communities know and what responders have learned, we lose the ability to understand where we have been. And without that, we cannot guide where we are going.

That is why Shabaka’s next chapter is the Nafeer Community Knowledge Lab — a partnership with the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies at the University of Sussex — focused on ensuring that community-generated knowledge reaches the spaces where decisions are made.

The learning outlives the structure. But only if we protect it.

Three girls wearing hijabs sit at a wooden desk in a classroom, reading and writing in open notebooks as sunlight streams through the window—an image that echoes the Sudan Crisis Response: an origin story in three acts—a reflection on resilience and hope. — Three girls listening during an Accelerated Learning Programme (ALP) lesson in Port Sudan (Image credit: Mussab Salahaldeen/ Save the Children)

A message for the HLA community

Three years in, Sudan remains the world’s largest displacement crisis and one of its most underfunded. The community response — Emergency Response Rooms, mutual aid networks, diaspora mobilisation — has outperformed the international system by almost every operational measure. The sector keeps rebuilding the same bridge in the rubble of the last one.

What humanitarian leaders owe to Sudan’s communities is not another report on localisation. It is the political will to fund, trust, and follow them.

About Bashàïr

Bashàïr Ahmed, PhD, is a humanitarian researcher, practitioner, and founder of Shabaka. She is a Research Associate at the Sussex Centre for Migration Research at the University of Sussex and an independent strategic adviser to humanitarian organisations and donors.