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106. Get out of the way
The Emergency Response Rooms in Sudan have, over the past couple of years, become the backbone of humanitarian action in Sudan. As community-based informal organizations, the ERRs provide mutual aid to more than 2 million people in Sudan.
In this week's episode Hajooj Kuka and Justin Corbett discuss the work of the ERRs with co-hosts Mabala Nyalugwe and Lars Peter Nissen.
Transcript
Welcome to Trumanitarian. I'm your host, Las Peter Nissen, and a special welcome to Mala Nial Lure, my co-host on this excellent episode.
Mabala Nyalugwe (:Thank you very much Las Peter or who I call Mr. Brown. It's great to be here. My name is Mabala, as he said, and I'm looking forward to the conversation.
Lars Peter Nissen (:And I think it would be fair to our listeners to disclose that you're also my daughter, my plastic daughter, as we would say in Denmark. I married your mom when you were around 11 years old and since then I have aimed to be some kind of parental guidance for you, more or less successfully.
Mabala Nyalugwe (:Yes. I think well put, nothing to add.
Lars Peter Nissen (:We are doing this because we have for a while discussed that you and I should do a show together called Humanitarian Hacks, where we try to really get out of the bubble that we sometimes end up in the humanitarian sector when we talk about reform or disruption or whatever and go see if we can find some truly alternative perspectives on humanitarian action.
Mabala Nyalugwe (:Yes, and I think also just because we come from different backgrounds, I mean Yo Danish, I'm Ugandan Zambian, even though we've lived together all these years, we've still worked in different spaces and we're hoping that that experience will also come through in the podcast, but also with the people that we interview, we kind of want to move away from just saying what's wrong, but actually give ideas and examples of what's improving and what's better. And so hopefully the humanitarian hacks will do that.
Lars Peter Nissen (:Exactly. And I think we have an excellent example this week of something truly alternative and very powerful. Alright, so this week we have the emergency response rooms from Sudan in the studio. We met them, we were both at H and PW last week and we met them there and recorded this interview. And it was just an absolutely fascinating discussion around mutual aid, really community-based aid that just emerges because of the terrible situation in Sudan.
Mabala Nyalugwe (:And I think our guests go into how they actually acquired this aid, how they account the money. And I think it's really interesting how this is done because there's so much talk about localization and how do we account for funds. And I think this is a really good example of how people on the ground can get money quickly, can account for it, and can actually focus on doing the work that needs to be done.
Lars Peter Nissen (:They sort of tick all of the boxes, they they're accountable, they're scalable, they're cost effective, and they're appropriate because it comes from the communities themselves. It's a very hard thing to not take seriously. And it's for me, just wonderful to see a truly alternative model for humanitarian aid emerge.
Mabala Nyalugwe (:Yeah, and I think what was so refreshing is that we always hear about this localization and we always hear about how people want to do it differently, but for me, I learned so much from this example and it was so good to see that put into practise and to see how it works. And so yeah, I think this is what we want to do with Humanitarian hacks is have more of these discussions of how things can be done differently and have concrete examples and kind of step away from that conference talk and that operations view. And so yeah, I'm really looking forward to this episode and more to come,
Lars Peter Nissen (:Let's get out of the way and listen to our guests.
Mabala Nyalugwe (:Great.
Lars Peter Nissen (:Hajooj Kuka and Justin Cobett, welcome to Trumanitarian.
Hajooj Kuka (:Thanks for having us.
Lars Peter Nissen (:I'm joined today in the studio by my co-host, Mabala Nyalugwe
Mabala Nyalugwe (:Hello everybody. It's great to be here. Looking forward to this wonderful discussion
Lars Peter Nissen (:Last night we met at the Hotel Intercontinental where the two of you among other colleagues presented the work of the emergency response room in Sudan. And it was such a wonderful encouraging story. It's impressive work you're doing and I'm really happy that we managed to pull you into the podcast this morning to hear more about the work you're doing.
Mabala Nyalugwe (:Alright, so had it'd be great to just understand your work with the emergency response rooms in Sudan, how it began and what you're doing currently.
Hajooj Kuka (:Okay, so it's a long story. So I'll really good to be here with Justin. When the war broke out in Sudan, the first few weeks we were trying to be anti-war and trying to be doing the rest of our activist work. We come from the resistance committees in Sudan and whatnot. And really quickly we noticed that people are running out of cooking gas and you're living in a city and what do we do? And then we started hitting up our friends. So I knew a guy when I was in Nuba Mountains, in Sudan, in a different war. He was flying with paragliding and they were trying to shoot him down and that's Justin. And I was like, I don't know what that guy used to do, but I'm going to call him and then I'm going to call all these other people that I know because I never worked in humanitarian aid, I don't know what to do.
(:So let me call these people up and ask them like, Hey, what do we do? So I was them and they were all fleeing from Sudan and there was all this heroic work that all these people were doing in evacuating the international NGOs. And they were like, aren't you supposed to be the ones helping us with humanitarian aid right now? And they were like, yeah, we have to evacuate our people. And from then we put them in a WhatsApp group and they started becoming consulting us on what is humanitarian work and everything. And one of the most important words that Justin taught us, he thinks he didn't give us a workshop, but basically he gave us one word mutual aid, which we had no clue what it was, but we were like, okay, cool, so what do we do? And we slowly started coming up with structures and at the time we were doing mutual aid, the basis of everybody brings their own food, we go to the local school, the local, any public thing in the neighbourhood.
(:And because of the war you couldn't move from your neighbourhood. And people started cooking together and working together and figuring things out. And as the war moved forward, the middle class left and with them a lot of the resources left and people who used to send money from the diaspora into the middle class in TU where the war started, started sending these people money in wherever they went, Addis or Egypt or Nairobi or Kampala. So suddenly we lost that money and at that time we had came up with the idea of structures. So we had adopted from the beginning the idea of decentralised good governance and this is some of the stuff that we learned from the resistance committees. So we were like from the beginning, we're going to be all about transparency. We tried to be a hundred percent transparent, accountability and then just helped us with, it's not accountability, it's community accountability comes first before donors. So that was a lot of things we started from the beginning. Participation and equality then sure, I get you.
(:Yes, it was in the side that makes better. So from the beginning, so we moved from relying totally on ourselves and to started actually needing money from outside. And what happened was there was no, all the NGOs left, there was nobody helping and we became the only ones helping. So it just became too much for us. So we needed money to come in. And when we got the first amount of money, it was like 50, 40 something to 50,000 from LA Gatum Foundation at the time. And then from IRC anyway, so I-R-S-I-R-C-I-R-S. What's it IC? Anyway, so when we got it from IRC and Legum, we had to figure out what to do with the money and how do you distribute the money. And we came up with the idea, okay, so if we're trying to do good governance, we have to separate the executive from the legislative and make sure we have a constitution.
(:So we wrote a charter and we all signed up on the charter. It was at the time in harum. And we decided we have working groups and then we have the representatives. And we started having two reps from every district. Harum has seven districts, and then we had a gender issue. So we added one more and at least one seat needs to be a woman. So we had the reps and then we had the working groups, which were divided into committees and offices. And the importance of that is we were learning. So we started learning terms like, oh, we have the programming, the finance, the external comms, external comms, the reporting. So these are the committees where they work on everything. And then we have the offices and those, we came from our relationship with OCHA that started really early and we started having their naming from clusters, so the health, the services, so all that. And we also added the women response rooms and media and stuff. So we started slowly coming up with all these things and started slowly growing. And it took a few months.
Lars Peter Nissen (:At this stage of the development, how many people are involved?
Hajooj Kuka (:So in the beginning it was only in atu, there's about 3,500 to 4,000 people who were involved as the coordinating volunteers. So they're the ones sitting in meetings, discussing, doing things, and then when you do the work on the ground, then everybody, the community, it opens up to the community that gets involved in different ways. Some of them don't call themselves. We have the people who just come in and just criticise us every day and then we have to fix things and they don't call themselves ERs. So we are very weary about we want to call everybody ERs, but we're not going to call you if you're not. So you have the community engaging. So it's around that number. And then the war expanded to the four. So people in therefore hit us up and asked us, okay, what do we do? So we gave them the things we wrote and we also gave them 4,000 from the legato money being like, this is 4,000, set up your structures.
(:And they took a few weeks, they put the money aside and took a few weeks to set up their structure and then have the first discussion, how do you spend 4,000? It's 4,000. And they were trying to cover I think all of NI and then fascia is not the end, so it's just like how do you distribute money where there's a few million people who you could serve? So that was the beginning and they expanded into that four. And right now we created something called the localization coordination Council because we realised that the different NGOs we're working with don't talk to each other, the local NGOs don't talk to each other, and we needed a place that we all the different ERs to come to talk. So we created this localization coordination council, and in the beginning it was, and then DAR four, and then we had four international NGOs as observer.
(:Now we have five and we have nine local NGOs with three more in the way coming. And sadly, the number of states kept increasing. Right now we're 13. I'm saying sadly because when the war expands that you become part of this and you have to make the structure and it works. The interesting thing is from the beginning, the places that were stable, like Meni Beni was stable at the beginning of the war. ERs could not work in Meni. There was all these international NGOs and local NGOs and they don't allow for the space for the community to organise alone. It takes time for the community to organise. Mutual aid is never straight up clean. It's always you leave the community decides what they want and it's not always the right thing to do. So it didn't work. The moment medini was taken over by RSF, the same thing happened that happened in harum.
(:The international national NGOs were the first ones to flee. The community was left alone. That's when the ERs were set up and that's when we were like, okay, cool, we have these partnerships, this is how we work. And then we managed to do it and we managed to do amazing work in the Jazeera helped a lot of people, did a lot of evacuations. So the guys there did the amazing work. And the amazing thing about the ERs is we don't set up ERs. So we basically, the ER is an idea. So people say we want to set up an er, and they hit us up and I was like, who are you? Do you have enough people? Do your connection. So we just tell them where it is and we just go do it and come back to us and then we give them money without joining the ERs or being super structured.
(:So they start operating and while they're operating, we help them. So people from other states come in and be like, okay, well name somebody as a programmer, name somebody as finance. And then we start telling them, we walk them through how it's done and we allow them to get to the point they say, okay, we want to organise on the state level, we want to join the LC. So mutual aid is always tell them, you have to do this to do this. The community themselves, you just hearing about the idea and saying, we want to do it, and then they do it. Nobody goes to that community and the war helps. I mean I think if it wasn't for the war, there would be this specialist that goes there and creates a havoc and tried to do it. Right now it's like nobody can go there. So you're on your own.
Justin Corbett (:I still remember that conversation right at the beginning. And just to clarify for them, the listeners here, what I thought was so important, I remember your face even as I said it, when and all of his colleagues were first starting on this journey and we introduced this term of what we're now calling Mutual aid had is saying, oh, so that's what it is with. That's that'ss a way that's an accepted way of working. What I mean by that is that up to then, as he said, although a Georgian CO were not part of the humanitarian sector, they were aware that the humanitarian sector was supposedly the way to interact in the crisis. So it was very freeing. I saw for Georgian colleagues when they realised, no, there is a totally different way of working that's legitimate. It's called mutual aid, but it operates under a completely different set of rules. And then everything he's just explained for the last quarter of an hour, they were able to do because they said, yeah, this is cool. There's a concept, there's a language that allows us to do this.
Mabala Nyalugwe (:Just reflecting on what you said, I think for me what really stood out was what was already in existence. I think when we think of a, we don't realise the network which already exists in place and there's so much about what you were saying about calling people up and having groups already doing so much. And I think when we think of this aid, we always assume that we're sending this aid to a vacuum and nothing is there, but there's so much already in existence and just your description of those networks and people coming together and calling this person, calling that person for me was so good to hear, yes, there is stuff already happening, people already organising themselves and how can we just help that organising? And I think for me also your point about asking people what do you want to do? And I think that to me was very important. But also realising how you had said in that town where there was peace, these groups didn't really have space to operate and then when they left they did. And so how do we create that space for people to actually do what they need to be doing? They know what needs to be done. And I found that really interesting that already existing organisation that's already happening that we tend to forget.
Justin Corbett (:Absolutely. When we, maybe we'll spend a couple of seconds on this so-called resilio fund that's being set up in the future, but when we were looking at a name for that one thing we were trying to see, could we call it the get out the Way fund for exactly that reason. And actually to mom yesterday suggested an even stronger term, which I won't repeat on this family show, but it is that we take up so much oxygen and yet as you say, the activist movement of the resistance committees were an extraordinary asset that was already active.
Hajooj Kuka (:There's this thing that's been going on for 10 years or more for a decade, and we took it to the next level or a different level. One of the things about not having a workshop, so when we organised together, so we made the structure and we have the programming, the finance and ada, and then we have the offices and we have the charter and we have all this beautiful stuff that we wrote that came from the resistance committees and the whole good governance and everything and this amazing diversity and everything participation. We all sat together and it's like, okay, so what are you doing now? And we're like, let's call Justin up. And Justin talked to us for an hour and a half and he introduced us to something that now we call the F system that we redefined and worked on in something. And the F system is basically forms because there's something about bureaucracy, things need to be written when you are so big diverse group.
(:And that important thing about turning all this theoretical talk of empowering the grassroots because we have 600 base ERs that is in a lot of districts and stuff. And these base ER is just the neighbourhood. Every neighbourhood and every neighbourhood does anything between communal kitchens to children, alternative education to women, break rooms that deal with gender-based violence to women cops and stuff. And basically the forms, the first form is called the F1, and anybody in the ER know them, F1, F two, F three, F four, and they know where they are. But basically the F1 is the planning and the planning needs to be written by the local, the base CR, and the base CR is the only one that can write that and they decide what they want to do with the money. So that was the power. Having this system, this bureaucracy was super important because we needed a trace because of that accountability and everything.
(:And now we are just taking it. We have some geeks in our ER network, we have like 12,000 coordinating members with 20,000 other members with unlimited number of other members going on. But basically we have these geeks for took all these crazy thousands forms that were filled and they're using them for data and now they're putting all these charts and now we know how many beneficiaries we have. So now when we are partnering with organisation like WFP or unicef, and they ask us, so how many people do they have here and what's the number of beneficiaries and how many women, we can answer all those numbers or things because of this, the F system, which we didn't think from in the beginning. So we're also improving the system. And we changed it to make it very specific to us because we are doing humanitarian aid, mutual aid, we're not just doing mutual aid in general, while any money that we get goes into humanitarian aid while the training that we're talking to you, because the majority of the people within our structure are youth and women who are doing the work. So there's a lot of developmental going on and there's a lot of discussions and stuff and practise and experiment of democracy that's going on, which is amazing but unpaid for.
Justin Corbett (:And I also remember with those introducing those systems and at one stage getting quite worried after a few months that oh golly, these formats are evolving into something that looks horrible and imposed and hadu, let's get rid of those. We've got flexible money we can bring in through Philanthropics. And he said, no, whoa, slow down Justin. No, this has nothing to do with you guys. We need these forms for us as a way of us as a movement that's serious about coordination, that's serious about accountability. We need these. This is our tool. It's not for you guys. And we see that six months ago they presented their system to UN agencies in Kampala, et cetera, and people were blown away. And the UN is saying, we don't need this level of reporting. They don't even read your reports, do they?
Hajooj Kuka (:But the system was useful too when somebody in the community says, oh, there's somebody who's corrupt and stuff and he stole money. And we were like, okay, so when was it? This is the amount of money that went to him and it went through this account and there was the accountant person got it and they reported back they did this, did they do this? And they're like, oh yeah, they did. It's like, okay, cool. So there was a problem that he wasn't transparent enough. He didn't tell you that he did that, but the money was actually spent. So we are able to deal with these things that happen all the time and now we can use the data to try to organise. And when the thing that happened was in the beginning we thought, okay, we are doing this for a few weeks and the war will end two years later with all what's happening.
(:We are actually doing way more work. We are having millions of people relying on the emergency response rooms. We are way bigger than we ever thought we will be. And at this point we need this data. When we get a donation of a hundred thousand dollars that comes to the LCC, where does it go? Does it go to Al right now that is being surrounded and people need to be go out or does it go to Q where people are being killed and raped and stuff? Or does it go, so how do you have that discussion? How do you sit in a table and we have six hour discussions where our programming people have to sit and make a decision that is just impossible of what do I do with a hundred thousand? And there's the beauty, the community deciding, but also the impossibility of doing it. That's why you need these charts. You need these things and they're never full, they're never complete. But it gives you a way of we need a narrative. Humans need a narrative to be like, why are we spend that money and they help us with that. And I'm noticing this experiment of governing that we're doing, and it's an art,
Justin Corbett (:Absolutely,
Hajooj Kuka (:It's not a science and there's no good way. But instead of the international community, somebody sitting in Geneva deciding, I'm going to send this money to DAR four and I'm going to send this money to gender-based violence and I'm going to send this money to this. We're like, no, give it to us because do you know how we deal with gender-based violence in our communal kitchen? There's one room that is woman only and they deal with it. They have a very small fund and nobody asks them what they do with the money. They can actually just have coffee together and deal with it. They can use it to evacuate somebody, they can do whatever they want to do with it. And that's how we can deal with gender-based violence in a community that's so conservative as Sudan with the perpetrators walking around with guns and that they figure it out. And if you know you want to know how they did it, wait until the war is over and go to talk to them. But at this point, don't even ask them because the moment they reveal it, it's not going to work anymore. So I have no clue what they do with that. And it's a close thing. And we all understand that that's how you do with gender-based violence. You support the kitchen. So they have this coverup where they go and they're women and they can cook and stew stuff.
Justin Corbett (:And of course GBV protection experts would say, oh, ou, hang on, you're not up to C standards or core standards, which on one side is true, but on another side is just demonstrating for all the women involved who I've had the chance to talk with too, that our externally imposed systems are not always what's needed and are not the most effective way to work.
Hajooj Kuka (:In the beginning of the war, they gave us a workshop on case how they did a workshop to the women response rooms on how to deal with cases of gender-based violence. And I remember there was a case that happened and we were trying to tell them like, oh, so who has the case? And then and stuff. And then women looked at us and usually shut up and stay out of the room. And then we were like from that point on, okay, cool, we're not going to ask about this case thing. You guys just deal with it. Because in the end, the international committee has no solution to the crazy amount of gender-based violence that's happening and you don't have a solution. So when you don't have a solution, just be humble enough to allow them to decide and whatever they do, hopefully learn from it later. But at this point, standard in solidarity. And to me, that's what mutual aid is in Arabic translation that we use is, which is solidarity aid is just use standard solidarity with people and allow them to do their thing and allow them to tell you what they want to tell you, but
Mabala Nyalugwe (:A nice picture of what this mutualness should be because I think you're saying respect the communities and respect that, but hey, we can still learn from you. We have these now reporting mechanisms. We now have these forms, and so this is actually benefiting us, but you're still allowing us to use our knowledge, use our capacity, use our ways of working, our culture, our systems to actually fix our problems, but we still learn from you and can still adapt what you're giving us, right? As opposed to like, okay, yes, money should go here or do it this way or do it that way. And I think for me, just hearing you guys talk about that exchange of ideas and way of doing things, but so important, but also respecting what's already there. I think that's a really, really big thing is knowing these people have been fixing their problems and this is how it should be done, but we can still learn from you guys and yes, let's have new reporting systems or whatever.
Hajooj Kuka (:A lot of the NGOs that come and work with us and they want to give us capacity building and they want to teach us how to write grants and all that and how it's amazing and it's going to change our lives. And sometimes I look at them and just like, can I give you a workshop on our F system or on mutual aid? If you want to work with grassroots, can we give you a workshop? And I specifically told them, we would give you a workshop, can I give you a workshop and can we get our people from the ground to give you a workshop? They always refused because they're supposed to teach us. We're not supposed to teach 'em anything. But yeah, definitely. I think there's a lot that can be learned. One of the things that I'm hoping one day, because Justin works in all these other places, we took some of the learning from Justin and we tried to engage with Myanmar or with the group
Justin Corbett (:you did engage and you had a big impact. We'll talk about that.
Hajooj Kuka (:And I think I hope we can engage more. It was happening in Haiti, it was happening in Myanmar, Syria, it's really important. And when the fires were happening in California, part of it was I was thinking, I was actually trying to be like, Hey, can we help we, this mutual aid would work really good because these people actually are having enough resources. I think they don't even need anybody else if they actually pull themselves together. But of course they didn't reach out. I tried. But I think it would work really well in resources, especially for that small period where you actually really don't need anybody else in Sudan. When the war broke out, literally from April until October, all the funding we got was a hundred thousand and we were able to do so much with that a hundred thousand because we just needed basic things. And it's embarrassing to say, isn't it
Justin Corbett (:50,000 at the beginning of the biggest humanitarian crisis And what had is telling us it was just the fact that that little amount was coming in totally flexibly for us to decide. And they even put it a bit to the side. They weren't ready yet. Dfo, imagine $4,000 you started with and you said, and it took some weeks for people to work out, okay, how are we going to start managing ourselves? This is not about money anyway. We don't need usaid, we don't need anyone. We just need a change of mindset of how the humanitarian system starts to recognise the power of what people are doing and how to help it in a way without hurting it, give it that space. Get out of the way.
Lars Peter Nissen (:But it seems that we have gotten out of the way long enough for this to actually grow so strong that today you actually channel a significant amount of resources, don't you?
Hajooj Kuka (:Yes, yes, yes. Today. So last year I think we had about $20 million that we channelled and the war is increasing, so we need more this year. We also, the other thing that we did is we have the networks and these networks managed to have partnerships with FP for example. For example, the only time food was distributed to 80,000 beneficiaries on the ground in Harum was through the emergency response rooms over there. And so we have this network of people who are trained to do reporting, who understand they're connected to their community, who can do all that, and they're organised and all that. So this group can do a lot in partnership. We always say if we get 5% of the funding that goes to Sudan, goes to mutual aid, we can carry 20% of the load and then we can partner with the rest. So the whole idea, we never think that mutual aid should be alone, especially in a catastrophe like Sudan.
(:There's some stuff that we get to the edge, we manage to survive, but we need help. There's no way we can do it. Once a child goes beyond IPC three, IPC four, and then you cannot, it doesn't matter what you feed him at home, we are not going to be able to do it. We need to go to the hospital. The hospital needs to have the right milk, the right stuff, the right knowledge to get the child back into life. So if we don't have that, we are not going to move forward. And with that, we need help. So there is a part where we need the others to partner with us, but I think one important thing is not to look at us as long as they don't have access. Because in the beginning, the big thing in humanitarian aid in Sudan was like, we need access.
(:We need access, we need access. So we provided that access. The moment they don't need that access, they can move in. Then the first thing they do is they destroy our structures. And the first, the easiest way to do it is like, oh, we're helping these people volunteers. They've been volunteering for two years, we're just going to hire them. So we are just going to hire the best 10. And by the best, that means they speak English. So the ones who speak English will just hire them and we start giving them money and then this will help them out. So that's how they think and they come meaning well, but they slowly destroy our structures, do things alone, make decisions outside because it's not about us carrying out the humanitarian aid work because you can still come and give us, and we can carry the sax on our backs and we're fine with that.
(:But the decision of where to send the food is not given to us. And by not giving us the decision making is mutual aid. The moment you take that away from us, the F1 is taken and somebody in Rome decides food goes, this amount goes to Sheil, this amount goes to bad, this amount goes to there. And we just have to say yes, yes, yes to whatever you say, and we will carry the sax and give it to our neighbours. Then you destroy mutual aid. And I think that's the thing I have to say with emergency response rooms, we don't expect, we don't want to stay forever. We are emergency response rooms. The first time we tried emergency response rooms was in the time of Covid. It was covid, but right after Covid it was dismantled. The day they lifted the ban of moving, we dismantled happily.
(:And right now I've been volunteering for almost two years and I'm happy to be like, okay, we're done. This is history. We created this LCC, please take it. And guys, don't let it die and use it for the future and take everything we learned. And hopefully you can work better with grassroots people, but then we're not going to eat in the communal kitchen anymore. Everybody will eat in their house. So thank you. Thanks everybody. We're out. So we want to go on, we want to move. So I think one of the beauties of mutual aid from the beginning, especially for humanitarian aid and stuff, it's just like it's not forever. It's what's needed by the community now. And that's going to change and alter and developmental will look very different and hopefully it'll be completely new people or the same people altering, changing, whatever.
Justin Corbett (:And that point a huge how quickly external assistance done in the wrong way can do harm. And I'm sure we might come back to that. I know us wants to talk about it, but have you seen examples of where outside aid coming in the right way is actually helping the movement?
Hajooj Kuka (:Yeah, definitely. Definitely. I mean, sometimes a bigger thing is partnerships. So for example, one of the biggest thing we have with OCHA is we have this forum. Basically we have once a month we have an online thing where about 150 people come on star links from the ground. So people in DAR four or in Duan or something, they come in and then we pick a topic and we normally just hit up the Oche people and be like, can we get somebody from the UN who speaks Arabic, who talks to us about what to do with exploited minds or with how do we deal with alternative education or protection? And they give us somebody and then the person comes and talks and those small lectures. So he talks for 20 minutes and then people discuss and exchange information. And that to us is golden. So there's all this amazing things when the partnerships happen and when these individuals within these organisations give their time, their expertise and stuff in an open way.
Lars Peter Nissen (:So Justin, you talk about giving external assistance in the right way or in the wrong way. And you've been hanging around Sudan for quite a while. When did you first get involved?
Justin Corbett (:Oh, in Sudan. I've started working there as a community forester in 1989.
Lars Peter Nissen (:Yeah, so you know the country very well.
Justin Corbett (:Yeah. And no, I know little bits. No one will ever know Sudan, all of it. But
Lars Peter Nissen (:Or maybe Sudan knows you better than most other people coming from the outside. Maybe that's the way to say it. Yesterday at the reception you guys held, you were talking about having in a sense gotten it wrong for 35 years and that a lot of the things you've been working. And I think a lot of us who have worked for a long time in the business feel like that. What makes you think you're getting it right this time?
Justin Corbett (:The struggle I had starting as a community forester and then trying to understand participatory processes in both in developmental and more and more in humanitarian work all that time I realised what we were trying to do and people would still say this is the right way to go just and how to help get communities to participate more in what we're doing to help. Until I learned that's the wrong way to look at it. That's why we're struggling all the time. We're trying to get local people to participate in what we are trying to do. And as soon as you just switch your mindset and say, people are already doing so much, we need to learn how to participate in what they're doing and can we do that in a helpful way or in a harmful way? And that kind of just changed and it made everything easier actually. And it was all there in front of us. It's just changing your mindset and your optics. The difficult bit Lar has been having to both unlearn what we thought was good practise, but especially, and what hurts the most is when you see how we have pushed national civil society to evolve into something that resembles us in the international world. So all those good people in National Civil Society in Sudan or in Myan Mao in Palestine or in Somalia, they're saying, but Justin, we have to do needs assessments and we have to do these standards and helping them unlearn that. Yeah, it takes time and it's difficult.
Lars Peter Nissen (:That very basic and very deep insight that you just described. How do you make that travel? You're now working with putting in place sort of a global fund to fund this type of initiatives. How do you design that with that insight at the core of it so that you don't replicate some of the mistakes we've made in the past?
Justin Corbett (:Partly it is about having an agreed way of working and therefore the National NGOs Resilio fund this new global fund initially kickstarted by philanthropic funding. We hope other funding will come into it. It's a pooled fund will only support national actors who are interested in strengthening the mutual aid in their own countries. So part of it is about how the agreed ways of working, the broad guiding principles of how those national actors will then engage with mutual aid. Having that basic framework, having some practical tools like OU has been talking about some basic systems and some guiding principles is really important.
(:A second part of it is having a network of people like OU and extraordinary what they're doing in Sudan, but there's incredible stuff happening in Myanmar totally below the radar right now. Amazing stuff happening in Ethiopia, in Palestine, in Philippines, in Northeast India. So all of those brothers and sisters of had internationally, if they could be more involved in directing how Resilio fund operates, again, that's a kind of pretty strong check and balance. They won't let us go too far wrong. They'll blow the whistle on us, the sense of ownership if we make that our absolute kind of, what's the word Keystone and OU mentioned this, that if we ensure whatever we do, we never undermine that local sense of ownership, we won't go too far wrong. I've been, as I say in this business for 35 years. I have never seen accountability like I've seen with the RS in Sudan.
(:And it goes for the same mutual aid we're supporting in Myanmar or elsewhere. And I would say to any donors listening, this does not need risk tolerant donors. I would say that the work, if you start investing in the eras, you can actually, they've raised the bar on accountability. They are more accountable. W FPS said it to them, we don't need this much information and had said, no, we do for us. They're more accountable than us. So if you are risk averse, come and support mutual aid. Come and support Resilio fund and we'll show you. And I think that's the third point is that the facts on the ground speak for themselves. You're happy to have OU here today. As you say, there's so many countries where you could bring people in to talk to a true humanitarian who will just give you the same narratives.
(:It's wonderful. It's also shaming how much we got it wrong for 30 years. And as you say, I look at the mistakes I've made and I thought, well Justin, what did you do? Good intentions. You're right. But I think the other nice thing you raised it my Bella, that it's not that we are all wrong. We don't need to beat ourselves up and self-led a lot that Hadu and his colleagues want from us. And we can help. We've got plenty to offer. We just got to get that balance right listening and let them train us and we can train them. It's a two-way thing. It's mutual.
Mabala Nyalugwe (:It is mutual. And I think, yeah, I you've summarised that really well, like what Juju was saying before about meeting communities where they're at. But I think also that switch in not taking people into our systems but meeting them. And I think with this whole push to building resilience and building communities, you can't do that unless you really understand where they're at and actually support them where they're at as opposed to taking people into this space.
(:And I appreciate how long you've worked in the sector, but you see some, and I'm speaking more to development now, not just humanitarian initial assistance, but all these groups have been working in these areas for years and it's like, okay, where is the, of course work has happened, there's been lots of good stuff happening, but then I think we should be a bit further along in terms of the support that's being given and the work. There should be more impact of this work. And there is. But I think like you're saying, I think just pivoting and saying, okay, what are we doing wrong and reflecting, how can we change that dynamic and how can we see more resilience I think is a big one as well.
Hajooj Kuka (:So I want to talk a little bit about that really quickly. So one of the things about this whole idea that all this money was wasted, there was a lot of money that wasted when it comes to Sudan. Most of the money that went to support the Sudanese government was a total waste of money. Where at war, the whole structure was destroyed. This was really did harm, but there's very little money that trickled down somehow that we got training. The reason when we told you from the beginning, we adopted ideas of good governance because somebody gave us a workshop on good governance. Today we do meetings that go on for six hours that we have the 150 people, 35 people. That's very normal that almost everybody in the meeting knows how to facilitate a meeting and take notes and do all that. And somebody taught us that.
(:I have no clue how it came to me. I learned it from the street. This is how you do a meeting, this is how you facilitate a meeting. You shut up and wait. And anytime we have somebody coming from outside, it's really hard for them to be like, why are you talking, talking out of time? Why did you interrupt the person? What are you doing? And this is something where we're facing a lot with the ability people who just can't wait and allow an 18-year-old to continue talking because all of us are quiet and be like, you just stopped. You can't do this. So the training did help, but we are using it differently. We're not using it the way they meant for us to use it.
Lars Peter Nissen (:I'm afraid I have to do a WFP now because you guys have a train to catch. So we have to cut it here. Hajooj, and Justin, thank you so much for coming on Trumanitarian and thank you for the work you're doing. It's such an impressive piece of work and it really gives hope to see what you're doing. Thank you.
Justin Corbett (:Thank You. Thank you so much Mabala and of course Hajooj and Lars. Lovely to you to see you again Lars. Sorry, can I take another 30 seconds?
Lars Peter Nissen (:You may miss your train, but go ahead.
Justin Corbett (:Well, there you go. This is the team spirit. I do have to put out a head, no, what's it called? A hat tip to local to global protection and the team in L2G with Nils a great colleague of course for many years and other great people who are also trying to push this narrative of what's possible and thinking carefully about how to work in different ways. So they've been very much part of this journey as well. And it hasn't just been the philanthropics. Yeah, there are ways that the agencies involved with L2G for example have have been supporting what's happening in Sudan right now with the ERRs. So it's not all bad. There's great stuff to build on.
Lars Peter Nissen (:Thank you for saying that Justin. And I totally agree. I think we really have to remember that if we are to change things, we need a different narrative and initiatives such as the one Nils has been working on has helped us change that narrative. What you're doing now helps us change that narrative. We can't reduce this to resources.
Justin Corbett (:Yeah, no, no, exactly. Yeah. And the people involved in that and the agency's involved in that. You know who you are and I hope other people know who you are. So yeah, just keep supporting those different ways. We can do this quite easily, I think.
Lars Peter Nissen (:But we do have a train to catch!. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.
