“The system is not what’s holding us together; it’s our humanity.”
For Fanta Toure, community-led crisis response efforts like mutual aid are not an emergent movement as some in the international aid system see it, but rather a return “to the way things are supposed to be”.
“It’s people showing up for each other, and doing things for each other, and doing it collectively,” says Toure, now the CEO of Resilio Fund, a new philanthropy that supports existing ecosystems of grassroots humanitarian aid. “My dream is that five years from now, nobody can say we don’t know how to resource locally led movements.”
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Toure, along with Hajooj Kuka of Sudan’s emergency response rooms (ERRs) and Bashair Ahmed of Shabaka, joined co-host Christina Bennett on the latest collaborative episode between Rethinking Humanitarianism and Start Network to discuss the diversity of grassroots aid efforts, and to challenge the formal humanitarian system to adopt a more humble and supportive position towards locally led action.
“What the system can do is to move from leading by default to actually supporting by design,” says Ahmed, who points out that diaspora remittances dwarf foreign investment and international aid combined.
Kuka, meanwhile, shares anecdotes from the more than 800 decentralised ERRs – from neighbourhood kitchens and kindergartens, to clinics and women’s co-ops – offering a picture of a lifesaving network of volunteers who lean on flexibility, solidarity, and even joy to keep each other alive.
“What the ERRs did is showing that if the system collapses, we’ll be okay,” says Kuka. “The system is not what’s holding us together; it’s our humanity.”
Guests
Fanta Toure, CEO of Resilio Fund
Hajooj Kuka, External communications officer for Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms
Bashair Ahmed, Founder of Shabaka
Key moments [06:35] – Inside Sudan’s 800 decentralised mutual aid groups
[11:45] – Diaspora remittances are bigger than foreign aid
[16:57] – Community-led aid means going back to way things are supposed to be
[20:25] – The ‘permafrost’ of the aid system
[32:21] – Flexibility, joy, and dreaming: Lessons from feminist movements
[45:44] – When localisation gets co-opted
[58:59] – ‘Mutual aid is here to disturb the system’
[01:14:50] – What if 20% of foreign aid went directly to communities?
[01:19:00] – ‘Move from leading by default to supporting by design’
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Got a question or feedback? Email [email protected] or have your say on Twitter using the hashtag #RethinkingHumanitarianism.
Transcript | Grassroots aid is here to disturb the system Fanta Toure: “This idea of supporting mutual aid and supporting community-led effort for me goes with going back to the way things were or are supposed to be. We know that in the crisis the first person to respond is a neighbor […] Our lives are interconnected and they know this intrinsically.
Hajooj Kuka: “What the ERRs did is showing that if the system collapses, we’ll be okay. The system is not what’s holding us together, it’s our humanity, yeah.”
Bashair Ahmed: “We all kind of admire what, not just emergency response rooms, but generally mutual aid, but that is not translating to how we fund and how we support.”
Tammam Aloudat
Welcome to this special edition of Rethinking Humanitarianism podcast in collaboration with Start Network. In this six-episode series, we explore what really drives change in the humanitarian system
and what it tells us about future efforts to transform the system for the better.
Christina Bennett
In this episode, we look at reforms that start from the ground up, and force humanitarians to pay attention.
Tammam Aloudat
From The New Humanitarian, I’m Tammam Aloudat.
Christina Bennett
And from Start Network, I’m Christina Bennett.
Tammam Aloudat
So, Christina, you’ve recorded this without me. I was on a flight, and I was actually quite looking forward to this discussion.
Christina Bennett
No, I was too, and I was very sorry that you couldn’t be here for it, because you missed what was a really fantastic conversation about a style of aid that is emerging. You know, the intention of this podcast is to explore what really drives change in the humanitarian system, and for that central question, we’ve chosen this topic because everyone is viewing it these days as an alternative form of aid, an aid system, this parallel aid system that is emerging alongside the traditional humanitarian system, which is … everyone views to be weakening. But what we’ll hear from the guests is that this is not an emerging system at all. These are dynamics and forms of human solidarity that have been part of community structures and community ways of working for centuries. They’ve always been there. They’re just newly recognised by us, the traditional system, as being emergent. So, I think it’s, it’ll be really interesting to listen to, you know, what the foundational principles are of these forms of aid that have been largely ignored by the traditional system, both in terms of politics and funding, and what we can learn from them.
Tammam Aloudat
Of course, mutual aid in communities has existed for a long time, but as you say, it’s newly recognised, and one could argue that you really don’t need the recognition. But recognition means funding, means platforms, means, you know, the value of what people say about their own communities. And I think potentially this is a massive step, and hopefully, it will translate into recognition of other groups and different ways of working in other places.
Christina Bennett
But I think we also have to be careful, and this is something that did come up during the discussion, is that with these, this new platforming or this new visibility of these aid groups, this volunteerism, this mutual aid, that there isn’t a risk of co-option by the existing aid system. That we see something we like, we go to fund it, and in platforming them and in funding them, we put upon them a new form of pressure, or we start to ask of them things that they weren’t meant to do in the first place, and don’t want to do, but because–
Tammam Aloudat
And don’t want to do, exactly, yeah.
Christina Bennett
Exactly. So, fantastic that there’s support, but is there a risk that we’re just creating something in the image of a traditional system that we’re looking to change? And this is a system that’s rooted in, in different principles, I guess: in solidarity, in local knowledge, in collectivity and the power of collective organizing.
Tammam Aloudat
I mean, in thinking about it, I’ve met one of our guests, Hajooj, about a year ago in Geneva, and he was fantastic. There was a clear-eyed description of what they are doing. We will hear about that, but the emergency response rooms in Sudan is such a good example of aid coming from the ground and changing a lot of the system in its way.
Christina Bennett
Yeah, and I think it will be really interesting for you to hear what drives these groups, how they practice the principles that we all hold dear, but in slightly different ways and with very different interpretations, but so far with really impactful results. And what was also interesting about some of the experiences of these three guests was the fact that they were bringing their experiences from, for example, feminist humanitarianism, or feminist principles of aid, and solidarity into the work that they’re doing.
Tammam Aloudat
Can’t wait to listen to it.
Christina Bennett
Okay, great. Let me introduce you to our speakers, and then we’ll get straight into it. First, we have Hajooj Kuka, who is the external communications officer for the emergency response rooms in Sudan. The ERRs, as they’ve been known, is a network of mutual aid groups that have been at the heart of crisis response in Sudan since the war broke out in April of 2023. Hajooj is also a filmmaker, and he joined us for this discussion from Nairobi. We then have Bashair Ahmed, who is the founder of Shabaka, an organisation that has long supported diaspora groups and locally-led mutual aid networks responding to humanitarian crises. She joined us for this discussion from Brighton. And then finally, we have Fanta Toure, who is the inaugural CEO of Resilio Fund, a collaborative philanthropic initiative that funds and supports community-led crisis response. She joined us from Abidjan in Cote d’Ivoire, where she was spending time with her family. Let’s get going and listen to the discussion.
—
Christina Bennett
Okay, everyone. First, to get this conversation started, I’d love to know about your personal entry points into grassroots humanitarianism. First, tell us a little bit in your own words about what you do, what your organisations do, what they stand for, and then tell us what mobilised you personally to get involved. Hajooj, I’d like to start with you.
Hajooj Kuka
Hi, and thanks for having me. So, yeah, I’m a member of the emergency response room, and the emergency response rooms are decentralised mutual aid groups that span Sudan. So there’s over 800 of these small little mutual aid groups that are based on the neighborhoods and on then from the district level and then the state level. And I belong to one small one in Khartoum called [Al] Giref Gharb, so that’s my base ERR. It’s in a group, in a place that has over 30,000 people living in our neighborhood. When the war was in Khartoum, we had like eight community kitchens with 24 pots that were cooking, and then two clinics, and about 19 women co-ops. So this is the kind of stuff that we were doing. And what we do is mutual aid. So, basically, we’re all volunteers. I’m a volunteer. I’ve been volunteering since the war started, and we have all these different members that are volunteers. We do a lot of different activities. It depends on what the community we sit together with, the community, and the community can come to the communal kitchens, or whatever, and then we decide what we want to do with the resources we have. The resources is, first, our time, what the community owns – so the spaces, pots to cook in, whatever the skills we’d have, be it medical, be it teaching awareness. So we had places where we would get the kids training and whatnot, and then this expands to be for the 800 different rooms and over 28,000 members from the ERRs that work throughout Sudan. And we coordinate and work together, and we base our ideas on mutual aid, on the idea of solidarity economy, on the ideas of good governance, transparency, accountability, quality, participation. Over time, we had all these different systems, and bureaucracies, and whatnot that we created, the structures that want to make sure that we’re democratic enough, we’re grassroots enough, or whatnot. And what is actually more important than all that is the spirit of volunteerism, the spirit of what we call the spirit of mutual aid. And when we translate it, we translate it into solidarity aid. So that’s the core of it. What got me personally into it: when the war broke out, I happened to be traveling and wanting to travel back into Sudan, and it happened. And in the beginning we were trying to find ways to do, stand against the war, be anti-war, and whatnot, but really, really quickly, the bombs were really louder than what we can do. The methodologies that we used before of social media doing whatnot were just overwhelmed with images of war, and fighters, and the youth were following the destructions and bombing and whatnot. So the images were too.. it was too loud for us. And to find a way to keep the civic space open, we started like looking at other ways. And when, when the needs came about, we switched to mutual aid. And for me personally, being a filmmaker, it was like: what was my role? Like I’m away from Sudan or whatnot. And for me personally, it was finding the narrative, listening for hours to these emergency response rooms on the ground, talking about what they’re doing, and trying to put that into a narrative that then unites all the different rooms. And they’re very different, every ERR is different, but what brings us together is the spirit of volunteerism and the spirit of mutual aid.
Christina Bennett
Would you say that the impetus for the ERRs, did it start as a social media movement and then turn into an action movement? Or was one already happening and one just amplified the other?
Hajooj Kuka
It happened on the ground. It started by people finding things to do. So the first group of people were transporting medical staff and people on the ground to the hospitals and whatnot, and people were getting together and cooking together, and people were getting on bicycles, going, buying medicine from pharmacies to folks who can’t move. So it started on the ground. And actually it was exactly the opposite, where in the beginning we wanted not to even have a presence anywhere. We didn’t want people to know about us. We’re just like working, working really a lot, and different things, and we got a lot of funding from the diaspora. So it was really started really Sudanese, really close-knit, really about your neighborhood, people from the diaspora sending you money, getting things from the people who left would leave their stuff behind and go, “You can go to my house and grab whatever you want.” So it really started that very local and very, during the beginning was more about organising together and talking to each other. And it wasn’t until later that we needed attention and whatnot, when we needed more solidarity from bigger groups, and from different places, and UN agencies, and stuff. So it was later on that we started doing that. And up to today, the social media is really distributed, so we have over 1,000 different Facebook pages that represent the ERR, so we don’t really have a united thing.
Christina Bennett
Bashair, what’s your story? Tell us about Shabaka and how you got involved.
Bashair Ahmed
Thank you. It’s a long story. It’s… I’ve been in the sector for now 20 plus years, and I guess Shabaka kind of came from a time, you know, having worked in the UN with the INGO world, that the diaspora voices just were not heard. Diaspora communities who are responding to crises, I could see it, whilst the accolade and everything is going “Oh, the INGOs is stepping up.” And if you kind of talk about figures, you know, diaspora remittances are massive, and this is just through official channels. I think last year something about $685 billion were sent to lower, lower-income countries, so that’s bigger than foreign investment and international aid combined. So that tells you a little bit what, the aid sector is about what, $41 billion? So it’s really small in comparison. So that’s why Shabaka, kind of, was born essentially. Shabaka is a research, a small research organisation and practice. We’re very much focused on amplifying those voices, documenting these experiences and these stories about what diaspora, and increasingly mutual aid groups, are doing in their communities in terms of responding to crises. And my heritage as well, you know, with Sudan, I, we have covered several countries, but come April 2023, we had project covering several countries, like Haiti, Syria, Sudan, and such, and we had to step up. So one of the things we ended up having to do is essentially facilitate some of this coordination and connecting the dots. The work that Hajooj kind of talked about was so critical, and still is, in Sudan, is still being led by the communities themselves. So, how do you do that? And Sudan is always a blueprint, it’s always the test case for the humanitarian sector, and I feel that is, at the moment, we need to do much more – not just the learning, but also how do we amplify this blueprint? Not just talk about yes, the accolade, the emergency response room. How many prizes have they got? We all kind of admire what, not just emergency response room, but generally mutual aid, but that is not translating to how we fund and how we support in reality. So we’re using the language of localisation and support, but it’s not coming with the practice either. But yeah, so I guess Shabaka is really problem-solving and addressing some of the nitty gritty kind of challenges of almost translation between the different groups and organisations.
Christina Bennett
You mentioned you’re, you’ve got Sudanese heritage. What drove you personally? Was there an actual personal frustration or something that really motivated you to start Shabaka? And research, why a research organisation? Why did you think that research was going to be so important in this world of mutual aid, of grassroots aid, of diaspora prominence?
Bashair Ahmed
In terms of research, I always say, if you want to do advocacy, you want to engage in policy, you need to have the evidence, and it needs to come from the communities and hearing their voices. So, we’ve done really interesting projects looking at, you know, different diaspora communities. You know, we did projects with African Union, with the European Union, Global Diaspora Facility, where we looked at concrete example of how it’s done, because it’s learning for the sector from how these communities are doing it, potential for collaboration. So it’s to facilitate that. So if we don’t know what we’ve done before, what we’re doing now, how can that inform our future? It’s not just to have a nice report sitting on some shelf. The other part, my Sudanese heritage, I guess, is kind of one of the drivers to why I engage in this sector for so long as well. So it wasn’t just Sudan, it’s kind of looking at communities affected by crises. So this is maybe something personally I’ve been working on for many years and decades, but when you kind of see clearly the discrepancy between this is our roles, regulations, the approach, and paper, but then you see the practice, and it just feels sadly that divide between rhetoric and practice widening even further now. You know, I can see myself in many ways as part of this sector, this world – it’is just retreating into what’s easier. So when we’re talking about reset, I don’t think it’s reset. We’re actually just reworking to come back to this, so we’re not changing the mechanics. And the reflex is usually to, when money tightens, like, we’re having a lot of cuts here, so the behaviour is very much, it’s not a reset, it’s a retreat. It’s consolidating the center and not sharing. So you’re seeing that pattern much more prominently. So, in many ways, it’s: What skills can we bring to the table and highlight it to at least start problem-solving. Yes, the big organisations have a role, but what does that look like in future?
Christina Bennett
Thank you so much for that. So much to unpack there, and we’ll get to some of this in a minute, but before that, Fanta, tell us your story. What is the Resilio Fund, and how did you get involved, and what has your journey been through the sector til now?
Fanta Toure
Thanks, Christina. It’s a pleasure to be here alongside Bashair and Hajooj. I have so much respect for their work. Resilio was launched recently in November of 2025 building on a pilot work that’s been done for about four years to support community-led response to crisis. And that’s the idea. The idea is to recognise that there’s an ecosystem for grassroots humanitarian aid that exists and plug into it and help that ecosystem thrive, as opposed to the way the things have been traditionally designed. And to me, it’s fascinating to see how we as humans have turned solidarity into an industry. And so this idea of supporting mutual aid and supporting community-led effort, for me, goes with going back to the way things were or are supposed to be. We know that in a crisis the first person to respond is a neighbour, and if my house is on fire, that my neighbour comes, it’s not because they’re trying to save me or to help me, it’s because our lives are interconnected and they know this intrinsically. I’m personally very curious intellectually about: What does a global solidarity system that is based on this premise looks like? Some of the things that Hajooj was describing sound a lot like the culture and values in which I grew up. So actually, I was trying to respond to your question of “How did you come to this?” and I thought: I don’t know. Like, I think if you grew up in a collective culture, and certainly things that I’ve seen in many parts of the U.S., it’s people showing up for each other, and doing things for each other, and doing it collectively. And my first, when I was cutting my teeth in this field, I worked in Somalia for the organisation that later evolved into Adeso with Fatima Jibrell – a phenomenal environmental activist and someone from the community. And I remember seeing how, as an individual, she was treated by the international aid system. I remember witnessing the knowledge, and the expertise, and the wisdom that was being dismissed. And this was my wake-up moment of thinking that my contribution to our communities could be trying to be a little bit of a translator between the aid system and what people are trying to do and achieve with and for their communities.
Christina Bennett
Great, thank you. So I’m wondering a little bit about how you think that your efforts are driving change in the way the whole humanitarian endeavor works. Not the humanitarian system, so to speak. As you say: solidarity, humans helping humans, coming together around crises. How is what you are doing fundamentally shifting the way that we do, that we’ve been doing things as a sector, I suppose, for a century? Maybe I’ll start with you, Bashair. From where you sit, how are grassroots efforts, grassroots aid efforts driving change in the way that we act in crises?
Bashair Ahmed
No, that’s such an important question, and an important dialogue to have, because the reality is, as the sector, there’s different pressure points happening to it, which is: legitimacy is a challenge, funding for the sector specifically is getting tighter, and it’s just change isn’t on the table. So what’s happening is we have a shortage of courage, capacity to just being able to kind of evolve. Somebody referred to it as a permafrost, which is a system that we just refused to change. And this is where we’re at at the moment. We could see the pressure from the top, the decision being made. The communities are kind of like, this is not happening – you know, Sudan is a prime example, you know, leading and all of that – and you have this kind of like the middle just refusing to shift, using the language, adjusting it, the comms, and all of this, but the reality is nothing is really changing. You still have only about 1% of funding going directly, through the pooled fund, directly to frontline responders in Sudan, for example. The same in Ukraine, and just numerous other examples. So essentially, if you, the sector, is not able to evolve, it will die. It’s like a dinosaur. So, we really need to have a change of mindset kind of going forward.
Christina Bennett
So, I love this idea of permafrost, and you’re not the first person I’ve heard to call it that, this kind of, yeah, middle layer of just a brick wall, like an inability to get over it, around it, through it. An obstinance of the sector. What’s the permafrost that you see? Where does it sit? You say it sits in the middle somewhere, somewhere between the top – whatever the top is – and communities. Describe that to me. And how are you, or how are we, how is this group going to shift it, or break through it somehow?
Bashair Ahmed
The permafrost is coming in mechanisms. For example, you might have a donor or funder want to support a mutual aid group, or a group of network. Firstly, the challenge for them is the red tape at their end. You have to pass certain due diligence, you have to have a bank account, you have to have this kind of particular structures. That’s one. You design it, and the community is kind of like we have money to spend on AB, like really specific, and you have to kind of jump the hoops with that. So yeah, the red tape, the due diligence, that passporting, “Oh, we can’t do this,” that concept of professional. I still remember back in 2023 that because, as I said, Shabaka is a research organisation, but we got approached by different diaspora groups who wanted to respond, like medical doctors who wanted to go to the border to facilitate that, And this is in the NHS, at the National Health Service here in the UK – doctors, consultant, and such. And one of our partners on the ground is like, “Oh, this is great; however, they’ll need to have basic humanitarian training on the humanitarian principles before we can even consider that,” and I was like, these are the people who are doing the surgeries, who are looking after a whole massive population here, and you want them to spend time on doing your hoops of all these trainings, safeguarding, the different things that you have to do to be onboarded? So that kind of lack of capacity to evolve with the realities on the ground, you really want to save lives? Do it. Yes, we do need to have the rules and regulations around it, but, yeah, it needs, it’s not fit for purpose.
Christina Bennett
Hajooj, do you buy this concept of permafrost? Do you see it, nd how do you experience it where you sit in the ERRs? and what do you feel the emergency response rooms in Sudan is doing to break through, or to shift, to shift the mindset, as Bashair was talking about, of this highly structural, highly rules-driven humanitarian sector.
Hajooj Kuka
We’re, in the end, grassroots. We don’t know about the humanitarian world. We didn’t know it existed. We didn’t know any about that. When Sudan, the war broke out, what was happening in the NGO world, they were getting the NGOs and the UN people out of the country. so when they were supposed to be the ones who were supposed to be sit there and help us, when we went to them for help, they were like, they didn’t have time for us. they were like, the first few weeks was all about evacuation and getting them out, and there’s all these hero stories that were covered internationally, and we were like, “Okay, what do we do?” And then we learn from them. Hopefully, a few of them had enough time to teach us about how do we work, what do we need to do, and whatnot. And one of the most important things was figuring out this word called mutual aid. And the difference between mutual aid and our cultural way of doing things, nafeer, and helping, having the ideas of us helping each other – and I think this comes back to the whole thing – is that nafeer and neighbours helping each other happens at one time, and we can do it in the beginning, but there’s a moment where we need to do it for a long time. How do we survive for three years still doing this? And that’s when you need the structures, and you needed organising, and you needed whatnot. But having ideas about neutrality, about transparency, accountability, quality, participation – all these things helped us set up a system, and we call it the F-system. And the system is growing, volunteers really know it, and we have peer-to-peer teaching, and whatnot. And we got that from talking and translating that, in what we hope is a decolonised way, because the structures are structures that we came up with. The charters, and whatnot, are things that we came up with. It’s important for us to have had people in the middle, like Bashair and whatnot, who were on our side, who understood the system, but we were not in the mindset to understand what the problem was. So, at that moment, when they were telling us problems, we’re like, we just wanted solutions. What do we do? How do we work? And we need to survive. We need life saving. And I think it’s only until the point where the war slowly started reaching a stalemate in a way, in a lot of different states, and we were in a state where different states are going into recovery and into trying to think about what does thriving look like for them, that we started actually facing this issue. And only when we became bigger and more known, and people started working against us. Some NGOs had issues with us, where now they think we should just disappear. WFP is like, “Now we can take it over.” Other NGOs, being like local NGOs, “Localisation is about us, not about you guys. So, you guys, we will do this stuff, and you guys, it’s not good for the communities to have their own money and deal with it.” So now we’re noticing these issues are starting in areas where the NGOs can be on the ground and thinking that we should take over. You know they started hiring some of the volunteers and talking about “No, people need to have salaries, they need to work, you cannot just have volunteers,” and this whole idea of the community doing it, here’s better, more efficient ways of doing it. So now we’re noticing we’re in this conversation. What makes it really hard for the ERRs is because, from the beginning we’re like, we are only going to be happening, and then we’re going to dismantle, and we’re not going to be around. What happened is: the crisis is long. It’s been three years. None of us think it’s going to end up anytime soon. So now they have to deal with us, and it’s becoming like, “Okay, everybody needs to deal with us staying, and we’re going to be here for a while,” and we’re not this “Ah, it’s great to have grassroots anymore.” It’s more like, “Okay, now what do we do?” And there is a clash, and we’re calling it like the all-civil society – and I think this is what Bashair is a little bit talking about it – and then there’s us, which is a lot of people, different ideas. There’s people on the left, right, there’s everything going on, there’s communities from the different groups, like people who think their government is the militia of the RSF, or people who think their government is the Islamic SAF army people, or people who think they’re– so it’s like different people are so different, and we’re all in this group trying to figure things out and talk to each other and whatnot. And in the middle we have to deal with this humanitarian sector, and what’s happening, and USAID disappearing, and what this government thinks, and what that people think, and what this NGO think that we should work, and they have an opinion on us, and they don’t like the way we do stuff, and they want to control it, and they want to change it. So suddenly, we have to deal with, and they’re aligning with groups, and people finding, like, “Ah, if you break away from this, then you can get money this way.” And now there’s all these things we’re noticing, and we have to deal with. And in the middle of all that, right now, the crisis, the frontline crisis, is in North Kordofan in El-Obeid. So it’s this one city that’s being surrounded. And I just want to say this story. Like, we have this member who’s super active, and he’s like working with us, and suddenly he’s like, “Guys, my wife is about to give birth, so I have to evacuate because the hospital that she was supposed to give birth, and just got hit by a drone, and I don’t know what to do. So I’m just trying to run away and going to Kosti to try to give birth because she needs a C-section and nobody here can give a C-section.” So we’re in the middle of this where the whole ERR sit together and everybody’s in solidarity, and all the states are like, okay, all our money goes to North Kordofan. So all what we have, this flexible funding that we can decide on, just goes there. And then everybody else has to fundraise again for everybody else. And that was a decision that was just suddenly made. Now we have to wait for the, you know, the UN, everybody else. They need time, they need to have the old methodology of they need data to decide on things, and people need to get together. While in the ERRs, it just happened, and we’re all like, “Okay.” So I feel like we hear about the humanitarian sector, we are part of it, but, like Bashair said, we’re a tiny part. Like, we’re fighting to get 5% of the funding, to raise it to maybe, hopefully, 10% of the funding. We’re like, we’re not even.. I think our highest level is we’re talking about maybe we’ll reach 20% of the funding goes to grassroots groups, one of them is mutual aid, but also other methodologies.
Christina Bennett
And I’m not surprised at the fact that you, that the ERRs are still operating, you know, three years after the war began, basically, because this is the way crises grow. Crises are never emergencies, they’re never short term. They’re never that first response and then done. I was reading a statistic the other day that 94% of funding in the humanitarian system goes to protracted crises or crises that are five years or more. You’re probably going to be bumping up with this system for quite a long time. It’s not surprising that you’re already finding that.
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Like Hajooj Fanta, you speak about solidarity and mutual aid as things that have already existed in communities and that are that are just coming to prominence now, because the rest of the system hass kind of collapsed in these last few years, or is, is on the back foot. You’ve also talked a little bit about what the humanitarian system can learn from, for example, feminist and Indigenous movements. So I wanted to hear a little bit more about that. What can those movements tell us about how aid should be organised differently? Not only around delivery, but also things that your colleagues are just talking about now, around solidarity. What does solidarity look like? What does volunteerism look like? What does dismantling power, or shifting power look like in practice from the practice of feminist aid and Indigenous movements?
Fanta Toure
First, I want to say mutual aid, I believe, existed most times and comes under stress when it’s running all the time. It’s not a permanent way of living, to relying and over relying on each other like this. And because we are in this world of polycrisis now, where you’re seeing emergencies everywhere, it is becoming more visible. And I think that’s the opportunity that we’re looking at now. And I’m going to ramble a bit, but I’ll come back to your question. I have three kids, they’re young, and they sometimes compete for my attention, and every now and then I have to tell one of them, “Baby this is not your moment.” And I feel a little bit that way about the moment that we’re in. I feel that it is the moment of community-led work. My dream is that five years from now, nobody can say we don’t know how to resource locally-led movements. And the last rambling thing that I’ll say before I go back to your question is – and I think it’s NEAR that was one of the most recent ones or first ones to point that out – it’s important to start shifting from localisation to locally-led, because localisation keeps centering the traditional aid system, and that’s not, that’s, that’s not what we’re trying to do anymore. There’s a few things that surprised me, returning back to the humanitarian aid sector, quote unquote, from the feminist space, and one of them was the silos. I feel like the conversation on silos, and on flexible core long-term funding has moved far ahead in the feminist movement place. Right now in the humanitarian sector, we’re still looking at conversations about: is this resource going to be for the life-saving part of the emergency, is it going to be for recovery, is it going to be for…? So that’s one of the pieces that I think we have lessons to learn, that the young lady in Eastern DRC, right now, who’s dealing with Ebola is also dealing with issues of protracted crisis, access to water, wants to go to school, wants to play with her friends, doesn’t want to be married early, safety, ll of this together, and this is going to last for a long time. So, flexibility and less silos is one lesson that stays with me. The other one that stays with me is – I feel like it’s the muscle that the feminist space had to build – is this capacity to dream and to imagine, and to say that this different world that we are fighting for is happening. It’s there, and we can drive towards it. And perhaps because I, this is something that made me uncomfortable coming back to the humanitarian space, like I felt nervous talking about joy and talking about dreaming, because people’s lives are at stake. And I think now, the sense of guilt is starting to go away, because as I visit communities, I see, and I, this is not the romantic “Oh look at people, they’re suffering, and they’re still clapping” –this is not what we’re talking about. This is really like people getting married in Gaza, people going on with their life, that ability to dream and to persevere is another one tthat is staying with me when I think about the feminist movement. Solidarity is another one. Wellness, resourcing oneself is another one. Being creative in finding solutions, thinking beyond strategies. I’m still meeting many actors in the humanitarian field who say “My strategy allows me to do this and not that,” and I feel that in the feminist space we have started reversing this and say: A strategy is a guiding map, you have to move with what’s happening in the moment and make that happen.
Christina Bennett
Oh they’re great, and I wanted to maybe now turn back to Hajooj for a second. What Fanta’s just described is a system based on joy, based on dreaming and daring to dream in a time of crisis. Does that resonate with what the ERRs are doing? I mean, you’ve described to us a very intricate system of governance and radical transparency and accountability, and that’s all really important. Is there room to dream in the emergency response rooms? Is that one of the elements that drives them?
Hajooj Kuka
When we get together, the difference between getting food and distributing it, where you get to eat at home, and when it has to be like, there’s these boxes, and the box is enough nutrition, and you get it, and you go home, and this will fit you, but we only have 1,000 boxes, so we’re going to give it to 1,000 families, and we have to register them, and whatnot, and there’s individual cash transfers that we give to these individual families, it’ll be great, and when the community gets the money, and they cook food, and whoever comes gets to eat, whoever comes gets to have some coffee, sit together, have discussions, whoever the kids come in and they get to play, and they get to share the toys… So there’s this idea that: together we will survive this. And I think, together we still dance and play music, and we still, yeah, dream, because we think we’re going to be okay. Together we’re going to create a better place, and we’re going to do it, and whatnot. So, hope and creativity and joy are always there. It’s only when you put the camera on us and you ask us, “Okay, so what’s the situation?” w have to tell you, “Yeah, we’re hungry, we need food, there’s rapes and stuff.” I mean, because you want to hear that to get funding. So this idea is like that’s the only story you want to hear, this, the single story you want to hear. But like, I was living in a war situation where throughout a whole year I didn’t see a piece of soap, I didn’t have a full meal until I was full, I was never full for a whole year, my water was always dirty, but if you ask me about stuff, I was happy. I was creating films, and we were doing theater games, and we were playing, and we were like super thin. All of us were super thin, but we were happy. We were dancing, we’re doing things, and we’re doing- and I didn’t reflect on the fact that I was never full through a whole year until later. But if you asked me, I was like, I was fine. And it was all looking at pictures, it’s like, wow, I was super, super thin, and it’s because I didn’t have enough food. But that doesn’t negate the fact that we’re all together on it. When we were bombed, and we’re all sitting together and running into shelter and whatnot, we were, by the time we’re out, we’re laughing, we’re like checking on everybody, making sure everybody was okay. So the idea that joy and dreaming and hope is weird is like, no, that is humanity. We’re humans, so we always look for those things. And like I just said, like this guy in El-Obeid, I mean, when hopefully they get their child, we will all be like celebrating the child and saying, like, how amazing that is, and whatnot. And yes, we have members who get married and have weddings, and the wedding is normally in the communal kitchen, and we get all the food together and make a little cake. So we still do those things within our communities, and celebrate the Eid. And we know that when Eid comes, we hide our funding because the diaspora sends enough money to cover us, and we know that when it comes, we don’t need to spend any money, because there will be like slaughtering, people will send money, people stuff. So Eid is a time where, like, the money is totally spent by the diaspora. So Eid is covered, and everybody expects somehow there’s going to be new clothes for the kids, and whatnot. And it happens every year. We know it’s going to be last minute. Sudanese people are so last minute. But in the end it happens, and there’s going to be joy, and there’s going to be bakhoor, and maybe things. And one last thing I want to say, in my neighborhood, there was a time during when the war was in that area, there was a famine. We lost a lot of kids. There’s a moment where we’re losing kids, like two kids every day. But now we’re seeing some of the kids who are now going into the ERRs, the women response rooms part of the ERRs, that are doing kindergartens. And the idea of the kindergartens, of course, is for the kids, but also for the mothers to go back to work. And we’re seeing the kids are now like, you know, they’re fluffy, they’re big, they’re a little bit fat, and they’re running around, and it’s great to see that, and there’s a lot of joy in it. Still, the situation is really bad, but, but there’s a lot of joy, and going through this and still being together, there’s a lot of joy. So I feel like, definitely, there’s a lot of joy. One thing I want to talk about feminism: So the majority of our members are women, and the amazing work that’s being done by the women’s response room. And they get to do the kindergartens, they get to do soap-making, and leather stuff. They do all these like projects that are very different than just feeding and whatnot, and it’s really empowering. We all know that this is a feminist movement. They’re the strongest thing. Even when the ERR stops, we know that the woman response rooms will continue, and we all know that. And it’s amazing to see them grow and whatnot with the shelter and the power of the emergency response rooms, because during the time of war, the women are actually put aside because it’s the youth who are fighting – that they decide what happens. So within that, it’s important to notice it, but when we have funders who come in and they’re like, “We only want to fund women-led groups and women-led activities,” we’re like, if we start telling you what’s really happening, then it’s going to, we’re going to kill it. When you say, I want to demand out of this, then you’re gonna actually kill it. So we just, like, step aside, and the women in our women response rooms just look at this, and they’d be like, okay, let’s just move on. But yeah, joy, joy, joy,
Christina Bennett
Yeah, no, it’s funny, I was watching Bashair and Fanta’s faces while you were talking, and such big smiles. I mean, what did this bring up for both of you as Hajooj was talking, because clearly this resonates with you in a big way.
Fanta Toure
It just, it gave me a lot of joy. I mean, a lot of the pictures were nice, but he said: if you put your microphone in our faces and you ask us about, then we’ll tell you this, because that’s what you’re asking for, I thought that that hits particularly for me. And then I started wondering – I mean, I know that this joy is there at the grassroots level – and then I started wondering: How do you bring it into the traditional sector? And then I had to remember myself that this is not the traditional sector’s moment. What we have to do is consider shedding more light on the fullness of life at the grassroots. And the other piece that I was thinking about is, on the feminist work, is how I’m fascinated by the fact that a lot of people who are doing feminist work will say “Do not call me a feminist,” and there’s a whole conversation around that. So there is the politics of feminist work, but it’s also clear in my head that woman-led isn’t necessarily feminist. I’ve seen men doing fantastic work that qualifies as feminist, because they are looking at how to dismantle the power structures, which I think is where the heart of feminism really is, and where I think ourselves– and someone gently reminded me the other day, a colleague from Palestine, that we have to be careful about whose gaze we invite in when we’re talking about what’s happening within the grassroots communities. I think that there is a conversation to be had about who we are making space for, whether it’s national organisations having learned the code and language of traditional aid and not necessarily making space for communities or at communities level where it’s main group or traditional leadership structures that are making decisions for women or for the entire community, and that are not necessarily bringing in the lens that they need to have. So it’s that dismantling of power structures that I, that I’m particularly excited about.
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Christina Bennett
Let me pick up on that and take us back a little bit to the relationship between the formal aid system and mutual aid or volunteerism, and what you’re talking about. Hajooj, you mentioned, you know, the fact that we may be killing some of these initiatives, some of these movements, just by getting involved in them, by structuring them, by formalising them. You talked, Fanta, earlier about turning solidarity into an industry. Is there a risk of co-option? Is there a risk that by touching the formal aid system, we may just kill the solidarity, the volunteerism, the mobilisation that these movements bring on their own? How do we prevent that co-option? Bashair, maybe I’ll start with you.
Bashair Ahmed
I don’t think you can necessarily stop it. It’s already there, because it’s a power dynamic. Because it’s kind of like, oh, this is the only route, or the only way. It’s not happening, necessarily, all across the board, but you can see that this is how co-option has already happened. And it’s happening now, we’re seeing it with localisation. That’s why some people are using locally-led, because localisation is being co-opted. I’ve seen an advert recently by an international INGO who is looking for localisation experts to be deployed to UN agencies. Come on. So it’s, it’s already there, it’s already in front of us. All the trainings, like the capacity – it drives me insane – like, capacity building or a capacity strengthening for mutual aid groups. So essentially it’s like “Let’s bring them in.” The same with diaspora; we’ve seen so many examples of “Let’s bring into our system.” The system itself is fragile. It has issues. It needs a lot of work. It’s about 10, 20 years behind the whole feminist movements, or climate. So we actually have to fix our, you know, our own house before trying to bring people into it. So that work hasn’t happened. We’re not humble. We haven’t learned that. So I don’t think he can stop it just because of that kind of partnership.This particular group who wanted to do a project, it’s composed of local responders and diaspora combined. An INGO was like, “Okay, we’ll give you money, but you have to do all these trainings.” I spent about nine months back and forth, and then in the end, the INGO was like, “Oh, well done, we’ll give you that money, but in the local currency, not in dollars,” which means it would lose significant value just because of the context of where they’re at. And they just had to say no, because it was at a loss. And this happens so often. There’s amazing organisation who, like, groups, who are doing these things without funding, or like with pockets from here and there, like simulation-based education right when the war broke out. Medical students wanted to continue their education, so you had Sudanese medics, diaspora medics established something called simulation-based education to train them wherever they are. So you have people who are, like, calling in the middle of nowhere, they just about got a signal. So the training is done through WhatsApp, and to do this so they can have their certification, finish their university degrees. And this was right at the start of the war. So that tells you about also the determination. People want to see a future, they want investment in their future, not to be rescued.
Christina Bennett
Hajooj and Fanta, I wanted to bring this question to you. We’ve all been talking about this potential for co-option and adopting the language of the sector in order to work with it and to get support from it. What Bashair has talked about is, you know, that we need to establish our house first or get our house in order before we can start working alongside what are very, very successful mutual aid groups. What is your way? What would be a better way of making sure that these groups are supported and enabled without killing them, without killing the curiosity, without killing the community relationships, without killing the flexibility that you all bring?
Fanta Toure
It’s a tough question. I’ve heard a different version of these questions. What it is was: How do you scale mutual aid without killing it? I think that people will make choices out of necessity. So a civil society sector that can only get resources if it behaves a certain way will at some point have to make compromises to access these resources. And so I’m excited to see some opportunities out there right now for communities and frontline organisations to have other options. NEAR is doing great work. At Resilio we’re starting. And I hope that there will be more and more brave capital to support the work that partners are doing, who are genuinely wanting to see mutual aid thrive. And there’s so much unlearning to do from all of us. And so the willingness to always question ourselves about the choices and decisions that we’re making, I think, is what will take us a long way.
Christina Bennett
Can you give me some examples of where that good work is, or what sort of things that good work is focusing on?
Fanta Toure
I think directly resourcing community-led effort without asking them to do audits, for example, meeting them where they are, understanding how they function. So I’m going to give you an example from what we have been honored to support, so it’s some of the things that our partners are doing. We have a partner in Myanmar, for example, where the communities were regularly bombed, and they constructed a shelter as part of– and that’s community, that’s people who are active within the communities. So those are examples of interventions that don’t necessarily fit the mold of the traditional aid system, but that responds to the need of the communities. And for an organisation to even have access to a source of funding that will say, take that funding and do what you need with it, or take that funding and continue to do more of what you’re already doing – not subcontracted, not something that I’ve established is your need based on a needs assessment – I think, can be transformative for an organisation, as we’ve seen it done. It also helps with the response time. Some of our partners in India are able to move micro programs to the communities within 10 minutes of a crisis occurring if the money has been pre-positioned ahead of time. Some of the partners are starting to explore what scale looks like within their own context, and what that means is identifying groups that either already exist or are formed in the wake of an emergency and supporting them. And that becomes scale, the replication of mutual aid initiatives, or giving them the opportunity to survive and thrive. We’ve seen how community agency is activated when these microgrants are provided to a community group who can then continue to do what they’re doing with it. Provide more food, for example, if that’s what they were doing.
Christina Bennett
Some really good examples, I think, of where Resilio is putting money in the hands of communities in that flexible way, and I guess, as you say, without the audits, without the requirements to demonstrate value for money alongside it. Is that the key to this? Is it the flexibility on the funding side? What is the key?
Fanta Toure
I think the flexibility is part of it, but also understanding your place in the ecosystem. Our place is not to deliver anything, really. It’s to move resources to those who understand their reality, and then can put this capital to good use. I’ve seen some of the conversations that our partners had with communities on community contributions lead to end results that were fully owned by the community. There’s a community in Ethiopia that said, “We have gotten to a point where we would wait for an aid agency to come and distribute goats in the case of a drought.” Now, if you’re goats got sick, you would go to the whoever distributed the goat and ask them to replace the goat. But now this is not happening because we have decided that we didn’t need goats, we needed this instead, and this is how we’ve organised for it, and this is what we’ve contributed to it. So, this power of agency and ownership, and also that sense of contribution, I think, goes a long way to – I don’t want to say restoring dignity, because I think dignity is always there – but making space for it to flourish and set the path for a recovery that is a lot healthier. I’ve seen in places where, in the Philippines, for example, one of our partners, ECOWEB, has brought in the district-level government into some of the work that communities were doing, mutual aid type of work that the communities were doing, and to organise, and the national government now is interested and wants to provide a little bit of a budget. We’re seeing similar conversations in Sri Lanka, where after the Cyclone Ditwah, the government was also interested in supporting more of this community-led effort, because they were impressed at how the communities was activated. I think that one of the key challenges is definitely, if you’re going to play the role of a translator, to arbitrate between who you are accountable to, especially if there’s going to be conflict between what the community will define as success, and what an external actor will define as success. I want to be able to say a classroom or an ECD center with children who are plump a couple of years or a year after a famine and who are running and playing is an indicator of success. How do I reconcile that or try to explain that you shouldn’t need to have an audit for this to happen? And so what we’re trying to do at Resilio is really to make more space for this type of interventions to occur, and then go back to the donors and say, “See, you didn’t need an audit, and this is what happened.” And hopefully that can shift culture.
Christina Bennett
So Fanta, what you’ve just described, both through your work at Resilio Fund, but also your work with governments in the Philippines, for example, that there are large sums of money on the table at a global level for humanitarian work by mutual aid, by volunteer groups. Can you reconcile the values of a funder, a back donor, like Resilio’s private capital, or of a government, and still fund these mutual aid groups without compromising on community values?
Fanta Toure
I don’t know. I hope so. But the first thing that I want to say is, that it’s not our work. Resilio is not doing anything other than moving money and helping partners be together and exchange knowledge and expertise with each other, so they can maximise impact. The only thing that we’re doing is shedding a light on a system that works very well, and with that system being more visible, inviting others – if they can operate in that way – to come to the table. And I think that’s where the impetus– you can’t change, I can’t think of a very eloquent way to say that you can’t force an institution to change. The change, they’ll have to do it for themselves, but you can show them that there’s an alternative way, and where it makes sense, I think they will have to do the work of adjusting their systems and structures inside to meet the need. Otherwise, as Bashair said earlier, I think the system will die. But this is also the privilege, honestly, of sitting in philanthropy and working with individuals who don’t have their hands tied with realpolitik. I mean, the conversation is complex, but for the sake of simplicity, who don’t have a government apparatus behind them and are willing for their, their capital to flow freely. The other thing that I want to say also is, like Bashair mentioned, that so much money is going through on remittances. So we do talk about huge capital internationally, but how much can be enabled with local capital? What does it look like for community-raised resources when diaspora becomes involved in a more systematic way? What does it look like when we have African billionaires – a class of which whose value may, or let’s choose those whose values will align to the communities – what does it look like if we have them start being excited about the potentials of mutual aid? We are in a world order that is changing, and I’m excited about looking into the possibilities that are coming up without being completely naive.
Christina Bennett
So, I did want to go to Hajooj now, and ask you some of these same questions around: is it possible for global money to enable these movements without compromising values? At one point, for you, humanitarian donors, the UN, other large organisations have pledged to fund and funnel more resources to the Sudan emergency response rooms. What happened with that? Did it, did that funding arrive? Was it the right type of funding for you? Do you believe that the global system can fund the ERRs without killing them?
Hajooj Kuka
I want to first say something. What Fanta was saying about: we have to behave a certain way. It’s important to realise that when we’re talking– because we do life saving, we do recovery, and then we do what capacity building, but internal. When Bashair was talking about capacity building, the real capacity building that works for us was peer-to-peer, and it’s continuous. It’s not one workshop for two weeks. I mean, I do agree, that’s BS. But when we’re in a situation of saving lives, we cannot say no, because our biggest risk – although we had over 100 volunteers who lost their lives during the war – but our biggest risk is not having the resources to evacuate whoever wants to get evacuated, feed people, and fight famine. And we’re really talking about this quote unquote partnership that happened between the mutual aid of the ERRs and the different partners – be it WFP, UNICEF, IOM, the foundations, FCDO, USAID, GFFO, the donations – it actually did stop a famine that was supposed to break crazy. So the idea is like, we have to take that money, we’re not going to say no, no to the money. We will bend over because that money will save people’s lives. And is it going to destroy us? It is going to destroy us. The ERRs will not survive this. The ERRs is not going to stay alive, and we know that as a fact. Like, we will be destroyed in the end. But the idea of us is not to stay forever, the idea of us is to save people’s lives. The idea of us is to get enough trainings and thinking that once we’re destroyed, something better will come out of us. So, I think one of our powers is knowing that we’re not gonna survive this. If it’s going to be saving one life, but it’s gonna destroy us, we will go that route of saving the one life. It’s more important than us surviving. Is it possible? I don’t think it’s possible. I don’t think we can survive… So, when we started, we started with our own resources, and then there’s the diaspora, and as I said, the diaspora never stopped. It’s always there. There’s fluctuation, we cannot survive only on it. Other than diaspora, we had foundation money in the beginning, we had donations, that is amazing, like people reading articles about Sudan then sending money to us. That money is flexible money, and it’s an amazing form of solidarity. And then we had institutions like I said, WFP, UNICEF IOM, FCDO, USA, GFFO, like we had all that happening. And to deal with them, we had to meet them not in the middle, very close to where they’re at. So we came up with a system. The amazing thing is, we came up with our own system, and a lot of them were okay with our system, which is the F-system. One thing about when it comes to reporting and everything, we notice really early: we need reporting internally, because when we’re so open and we’re such a big group, and the Sudanese civil society is a really harsh space to be in that’s very critical of each other, and it’s very easy now online, somebody will call somebody corrupt, and somebody’s like– so you really needed a system that where I’m external comes, I know that none of the money comes through me, and if somebody wants to claim, “Where’s this money?”, the money goes through the finance folks. And then there’s a different reporting folks, and there’s a different programming folks of how was the money spent. Like, there is this system that people can follow that we need it. One time a funder came in and they’re like, “Oh, we don’t need any reporting,” and we’re like, “It’s still going to go through our F-system, we still going to use our forms, we’re still going to do this because you might not need it, but we’re accountable to a community, and our community is really harsh.” With that said, I actually like that. I like the ownership of the ERRs. This is not charity. They know that this money comes in, I have right to it. Why did you make that decision? Why did you guys decide to take it to North Kordofan? I’m here also dying. So this questioning, that’s why we need to have all these systems. Our guys are using all these different methodologies to make the system transparent, as transparent as possible. It’s really hard with so much data, because there is, the data is there, but to actually be transparent, you have to know how to communicate it, and we’re struggling to do that. So with all that said, I want to end with one thing. One of our inspiration was the breakfast program of the Black Panther Party, and what happened was, you know, the country fought them, and when they were fought, they destroyed them. But one form of being able to destroy them is to actually give a breakfast program that the state had to give to the community. One thing about mutual aid, it is a form of resistance. So I feel like if we end up dying, but the system changes because they have to cover what we’re doing, then that would be great. Because you cannot kill the ERRS without actually providing these services. Which almost happened when the, when SAF took over Khartoum, for example. They tried to kill us off and stop us, but the community after a few weeks, community came back to us, and they’re like, “Hey, we need help, what’s happening?” And they came to us, and they asked us to come back and work, because the services were not provided by SAF. In the beginning, they were happy, like, “Oh, yeah, go away, we don’t want your lentils and rice, and we’re so happy to now have a different variety of food,” but then, after a while, it was like, “Hey, we want your services.” So I feel like one part of mutual aid – and this is just me thinking out loud – mutual aid is here to disturb the system. The system needs to change. I don’t want to be, like, volunteering for three years. It’s really hard on me. Like, I’m working for a lot of hours, and whatnot, and I have to. I’m not making any money, and I have to survive, and I have to find different ways of dealing with things. So, with all that said, I don’t know, I don’t think there is a way for systems like the ERRs to survive unless the system changes and wants us to stay. WFP is a great example. We did amazing work with WFP. We saved a lot of lives with WFP. The partnership was great – and now they don’t want us to exist, and literally they just want to go and do their own work. Like, we disturbed their systems in a way that we shouldn’t exist. The same thing with a lot of local NGOs that worked amazing work with us. They were almost shut down when we appeared, and we got them to work, but now they notice that, hey, they have to share money with us. They have to go through endless talking with the community. They can’t just program. So they don’t want us to exist. We are problematic to them, and the whole idea that we’re not registered, and now they come up with all these ideas us now, we don’t work. So, the biggest thing with the ERRs is that they had to work with us, because the normal model is the UN wants access, and they want the warring parties to give them access. For us, it’s like, you don’t need access. We can work in this situation, and the people are there, so you just need to stand in solidarity with them. This whole idea of access doesn’t matter. And when they have access, then suddenly it’s like, “Okay, now we don’t need your idea anymore, we don’t need the solidarity, we don’t need the people anymore. We will just provide things in our own method,” and as a fact, the best way to give money is through this, what is called multi-cash system transfer, individual funding, and this whole giving money to a group is really not good. So they come up with their studied reports, and they want to do things their methods, and they want us to go away. So, with that said, I think one of our power is: we’re okay with going away. We’re just going to keep doing it, and we are going to save lives until we’re destroyed. And I think for us not to be destroyed, the system has to change. But I think we will be destroyed, but hopefully, we would have changed the system enough that the next time a crisis happens – even in Europe or the US or somewhere – mutual aid is something that’s not a side thing, but it’s, at least they get 10% of the funding, like put aside in a methodology that works for people.
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Christina Bennett
I love that idea, Hajooj, about this question of your survival, and the fact that in the short term you’re going to take money from wherever it comes to be able to save lives, even if it leads to your own destruction. But that is entirely acceptable to you if that destruction of the ERRs acts as resistance and acts as that catalyst for change.
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So I wanted to ask you all, each, one question before we move to sort of a closing here. We’ve been talking a lot about the strengths of all of your networks, of the movements, of the governance you’ve put in place, the community motivation, the proximity to communities. There are so many strengths that mutual aid and survivor and community-led aid hold, but are we also in a way romanticising these movements? Are we laying too much on them? Will they create similar power imbalances? Can you each comment on whether or not we’re romanticising these responses, and how do we avoid replicating the problems that we have in the existing sector?
Bashair Ahmed
I think, yeah, everyone [is] kind of like, “Okay, we have to work just with mutual aid groups, that’s the future, and that’s it,” but we have to do a lot more work. It is romanticising that, that’s the only way, the only route. It’s not going to look the same everywhere. I think people want a silver bullet, a solution like, “Okay, this is the framework we’re going to work with all these mutual aid groups.” I think we really have to go back to context, that knowledge, these relationships. So in every place, every location, I think it needs to be new ones, and I think we really have to be problem solvers, rather than, “Oh, let’s follow this framework from A to Z.” I think working with a manual is not going to help. And as Hajooj said, mutual aid is a form of activism, and it would evolve, it will look very different. Look at here, being in the UK, you know, with COVID, how the community supported each other, and then there’s kind of, you know, evolved. So, there will be points of evolution at every point. It’s not going to be static. Some of them might evolve into something else – establish organisation, whatever it is. It’s whatever is needed by the communities. It’s not to be dictated from the top, necessarily. And this is why research, that knowledge, that peer-to peer learning – I’m glad how Hajooj kind of brought that kind of thing, not kind of a two-week workshop. How we even do the research, how we capture this learning is not kind of like somebody flying in, collecting it, and writing a nice report or academic paper. Get the communities themselves to document what is it they want to learn or want to share with someone else.
Fanta Toure
I don’t have much to add to what Bashair said. I think we should not be looking for the silver bullet, which is a reflex for us. And I also think that we like to put things into boxes, and I’ve been interested in seeing how we use ‘community-led’ and ‘mutual aid’ interchangeably, but it’s not necessarily the same, What I’ve seen as mutual aid in Sudan is different from how it manifests in Palestine or in Ethiopia, and so I think we do need to be attuned to what are the principles that we’re trying to hold, so that we can commit to those values and principles wherever we are, regardless of what they look like.
Christina Bennett
Hajooj, same question.
Hajooj Kuka
Romanticising… why not? It’s amazing. The spirit of mutual aid is amazing. The idea that we can, we can be there for each other when we’re stuck. The idea of that happened in COVID, and people were like organising, and if the system collapses, we’ll be okay. Actually, we might even be better, we’ll be more human. If AI comes and destroys the world, the humans will turn to mutual aid, yeah. So, I actually like that idea. It’s more like hope, and I think what the ERRs did is showing that if the system collapses, we’ll be okay. The system is not what’s holding us together; it’s our humanity, yeah. What’s needed is solidarity, and the best form of solidarity is to trust, to trust each other, to trust the people. And the best way to do it: You get the money, you give to them. You get the resources, you give it to them. They’ll figure it out, they’re not just going to become corrupt, they’re not just going to steal it, and they’re not– all that talk is not real. So I really feel, yes, there’s a form of romanticising, there’s a form of trust that needs to be in it, there’s a form of– but that’s trusting humanity, and I feel like if we stop trusting humanity, that’s going to be the problem. So, romanticizing it, I feel like if we don’t romanticise it, if we don’t have a myth, it’s not gonna work out. Because if you want to think about Sudan, and there’s a famine, and there’s very strict rules and researches that millions of people should have died, and that didn’t happen, and you want to say it’s just the calculations were wrong? No, the calculations were right. But because of that, people came together, this whole idea of the diaspora came together, the foundations came together, the institutions – the story was so powerful that people were like, “Let’s support this,” and people stood [by] it. Why do people come together? Why is there even humanitarian aid? Like, one of the things I was like, I was actually really weird our: Why are the Europeans sending us money? Why do they, why did FCDO even care? Like, why does the GFFO even care and send us money? Like, why do they even care? Why are we not seeing the same solidarity from African countries? And sometimes I’m like, oh, okay, part of it is it’s not like the money is a lot, that like this money we’re talking about, one billionaire in Africa can pay for it, cand pay for the whole things. Like, like this is not a lot of money. But because of these ideas of solidarity, these ideas of mutual aid, these ideas of human rights, because of what happened to the Holocaust and whatnot, people are gotten to the point, like we can’t just, we can’t allow that to happen. And I think because of these rules and ideas and stories, people forget these systems are in place, and if the system was not in place, we would not have gotten money, and the reason why these systems are in place were because of issues. So, I feel like sometimes we have to romanticise and remember our humanity. And I think if we don’t, there’s no reason to actually even give us money, or to actually care if Sudanese people are dying or not. I mean, if the only reason you care about Sudanese dying is because you don’t want refugees to come to your borders and to your country, there’s other methods to stop them. So, I feel like there is something about romanticising the myth of humanity that we should keep holding on to, because in the end of the day, the reason I am still a volunteer three years on is because of this feeling I get when I can be there for for my people, and the feeling that they can give me that they’re saving me. They also saved my life. So it’s just like this feeling that you can’t just explain, and I think romanticising it: this is the reason why we’re together, these are the reason why we’re volunteers. The system only works because we have 28,000 volunteers. It’s not going to work if you’re trying to pay them and give them money, because you can’t – there’s not enough money to give them. So, the system is based on a romantic idea that we can save each other, and there’s hope in the future.
Christina Bennett
Thanks, Hajooj, for reminding us almost a back-to-basics approach that starts with humanity. Okay, one final round of questions to all of you around what happens next. We’ve been talking about the relationship between mutual aid and the global aid architecture. We’ve been talking about what’s working, what’s not working. We’ve been talking about whether or not global aid should be playing a supportive role of mutual aid, and you’ve all had different opinions about that, which has been fantastic to listen to. But I’d love to hear from each of you: What are grassroots movements teaching us about what the future of humanitarian action can look like. And what will it take for this system, however you want to define it, to change for the better?
Hajooj Kuka
So for me, being I’m in the grassroots, so I’m like dealing with them [the global aid system], and yeah, learning the language, learning the things, trying to figure it out. But I know that the reason we were able to do this was because there’s been 10 years of people talking about mutual aid, talking about localisation. So there is this hunger to do it because there’s a lot of talk, and there was a lot of people within these systems, individuals who wanted to give it a chance. They had to create waivers, they had to fight their own systems, they had to figure it out to make it work, and we just had to meet them somewhere in the middle. And I feel like if what these people put together turns into a reality, the system changes. And the change of the system has to start with the idea that mutual aid, which basically boils down to we just going to give the money to people as a group – not as individuals, because I know that they already give money to individuals – but the idea that community is a real thing, and we can give money to a community, and the community can figure it out, and we can give them the money before we ask them. And we can then try to improve them and stuff, but they need to know that the money is unconditional, it’s not conditional on you succeeding, or you writing a report, or you’re doing the perfect impact. And having that as a percentage. Like, I really think if people can be like, “Hey, in any crisis, there’s going to be a small percentage – 5%, 10% – like a small amount that just this 5% will always going to go to the community directly.” And I know that the idea of community is a difficult thing to wrap your head around, like, what is a community? Who’s going to get the money? But just to be like, this is just going to happen, and we’re just going to empower that, and we know that that’s going to change – the community itself is a flexible thing that’s going to change – and we’re just going to be really flexible, and really step aside, and look and just keep supporting, and the support is not going to stop. So, I feel like if, if a number, a percentage is put in place, things can change.
Christina Bennett
What’s that number?
Hajooj Kuka
I mean, we started with 5%. If 5% of the aid that goes to Sudan goes, then the mutual aid will stay alive. If you raise the number to 20% then mutual aid would reach its potential. And when I say that, in Sudan, for example, it’s not just humanitarian aid, it’s also like keeping our stories for the future of transitional justice, allowing media and journalism to happen, allowing all these other things that we need as a society to happen. And allow that money to be mutual aid money, so journalists could have stayed working, human right activists could have become like professionals and work. So all this stuff that, if it was allowed, it would have continued, then if you give them 20% of the money and allow them to do all that, to do the reporting, to do the stories, mental health, to do all these different activities, the community would do a lot. So I’m almost think if you reach that number to 30%, then you almost only then need professional expertise to come in to help us, not actual money. It’s enough. In the end, let’s just face it, the system that exists is so expensive. In the end, they need to live in high-end places in Nairobi, and travel in these expensive airplanes, and get food that is super expensive that comes flying from I don’t know where, and they don’t trust the local markets, and they don’t trust people getting food on camels and donkeys for some weird reason. So I feel like, in the end, the system, it will be cheaper. But for now, stay as a partnership, give us 5 to 20%. Five [per cent] means we’re gonna survive and mutual aid will exist, 20 [per cent], It will reach its potential.
Christina Bennett
Fanta, same question: What are grassroots movements teaching us about the future of aid, and what will it take for the system to change for the better?
Fanta Toure
The word that’s coming to my mind is “keep going,” honestly. They’re proving the extent to which you can rely on external aid and have various different forms of aid. I’m trying not to use the word ‘reliance’ and ‘resilience’. I have a lot of feelings about resilience, but there is something about keeping moving towards the direction of where you need to go that is coming back to me now. I’m honestly sitting with the idea of bringing back humanitarian humanity in the systems. Like, I think there’s the people, as Hajooj mentioned, within traditional systems – we have allies everywhere – but I think the need to change the system is necessary if we’re going to continue uplifting each other. And so that spirit of moving forward towards a future that uplift us all is the one that’s really in mind for me. That’s what the communities are doing. I hope we can bring back dignity in giving as much as we give back dignity in receiving, because I think part of the elements of controls that we see now in the traditional aid system is also coming from lack of dignity and guilt in the giving.That’s where I am with this.
Christina Bennett
Bashair?
Bashair Ahmed
It’s what we can learn from the grassroots, is: Be humble, and you know, seeking equitable partnerships, and also that the social contract is our accountability. Hajooj kind of mentioned it, the accountability is to the communities themselves, also what makes that work kind of legitimacy. I think what the system can do is to move from leading by default to actually supporting by design – so they can do the convening, they can do the amplifying, the accompaniment, the brokering the access, but not lead it. We’re gonna be seeing less and less funding, so, you know, with a scarcity of resources, the reality is we have to do these changes now rather than wait for it until your organisation withers, closes, whatever it may be. So this is the time to do it – not have further discussions, but act. And I think that’s what’s missing.
Christina Bennett
Thanks so much to our guests, to Bashair, to Fanta, to Hajooj.Thank you for the fantastic discussion. It’s been really special for me to hear what has been motivating and mobilising you and all of your work, and to hear a little bit about how we as the humanitarian formal system can do better to enable it or just to simply get out of the way.
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Christina Bennett
To our listeners, we would love to hear from you. Is mutual aid the future of humanitarian action?
Tammam Aloudat
Thank you for joining us on this special edition of Rethinking Humanitarianism in collaboration with Start Network.
Christina Bennett
This episode was hosted by Tammam Aloudat and Christina Bennett, and produced and edited by Melissa Fundira. Concept and editorial support from Irwin Loy and Kia Howson. Mixing by Tevin Sudi.
Tammam Aloudat
If you have any questions or comments, you can email us at [email protected]. Please rate and subscribe to our show wherever you get your podcasts. Also consider becoming a member of The New Humanitarian to help us continue reporting from the hearts of crises. Go to www.thenewhumanitarian.org to find out more
