Localisation or exclusion? Lessons from Sudan’s ERRs

In June 2023, I was displaced from Khartoum when the war broke out. Within weeks I was working in Kassala alongside Emergency Response Room (ERR) volunteers, Sudanese women and men running communal kitchens, coordinating medical evacuations, and providing the only functioning humanitarian services across communities the international system could not reach. I watched them do this with no formal registration, no institutional affiliation and no security protocol. I also watched what happened when international donors started paying attention.

This article draws on 15 interviews I conducted in Arabic with ERR volunteers and humanitarian practitioners across Kassala, South Kordofan, Central Darfur and Khartoum in 2026. It is an account of what I found when I looked inside the coordination structure that donors are funding, and what practitioners need to understand before they assume that supporting the Localization Coordination Council (LCC) means supporting Sudan’s grassroots responders.

What the international community thinks it is funding

Sudan’s ERRs have received extraordinary international recognition. They won the Chatham House Prize and have been twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Donor strategies consistently reference them as the primary vehicle for locally led humanitarian response. The LCC, which ERRs established in November 2023 to coordinate across state-level networks, is now the principal interface between the ERR movement and international donors.

The assumption embedded in that relationship is that funding the LCC means funding Sudan’s grassroots responders equitably and accountably. My research suggests that assumption needs serious revision.

What I found inside the LCC

The LCC’s founding charter allocates Khartoum seven seats on its governing council, one for each of its localities. Every other state in Sudan, including the five states of Darfur which contain the greatest concentration of humanitarian need, receives one seat each. This is not an oversight. It is written into the founding document.

The practical consequence is that Khartoum-based ERRs hold disproportionate influence over agenda-setting, donor engagement and funding priority decisions. A volunteer from South Kordofan described Khartoum to me as a ‘recovery area’ that nonetheless secures more funding than frontline conflict states regardless of relative need. That is not a perception, but what the charter produces.

Women’s Response Rooms (WRRs) compound the problem. These groups emerged specifically during the conflict to address the needs of women and girls, providing safe spaces, health services and psychosocial support in communities where women could not safely access general ERR facilities. The LCC charter recognises them as a designated funding category. In practice they receive approximately 5% of available resources, while the majority flows toward the generalised priorities of food and water that a Khartoum-centred decision-making body consistently produces. They are a recipient category, not a decision-making actor.

A third problem operates through documentation. Accessing LCC-administered funds requires a national identification document through Form F3. Populations in parts of the Nuba Mountains and Darfur frequently cannot produce these documents because displacement has stripped them of their papers. The communities with the greatest need are excluded from accessing resources by a bureaucratic requirement that the LCC itself designed and has not adapted.

The representation problem no one is talking about

Beyond the structural issues, practitioners need to understand a more fundamental problem: the people who speak internationally for the ERR movement are often not the people authorised to do so.

The LCC’s own charter states explicitly that members must not speak publicly on behalf of the organisation without prior authorisation. In practice, multiple interviewees described instances where individuals presented themselves as ERR or LCC representatives in international forums, signed agreements on the movement’s behalf, or received funds in the movement’s name, without any verifiable internal authorisation process. One volunteer described a video in which someone presented herself as a representative of Sudan’s WWRs, and neither she nor other WRR volunteers in her network could identify the person or confirm any connection to a recognised WRR.

This is not a minor procedural gap. When donors sign agreements with unverified representatives, they are not funding the ERR movement. They are funding whoever had the right connections, the right language skills, and the right moment of access to position themselves as the gateway.

What practitioners are getting wrong

Three things stand out from my research that practitioners engaging with the LCC should address directly.

First, do not treat LCC endorsement as equivalent to ERR movement authorisation. They are not the same thing. Before committing funds or signing agreements, ask specifically how the representative was selected, which bodies authorised them to speak on the movement’s behalf, and which states and groups they actually represent. The answers may be uncomfortable but they are essential.

Second, create direct funding pathways to WRRs. The LCC charter recognises them as a priority but the decision-making body excludes them. Donors who rely entirely on LCC allocation mechanisms will consistently under-resource gender-specific services. Parallel, direct funding channels for WRRs are not a workaround. They are a correction of a structural distortion.

Third, adapt documentation requirements to the reality of displacement. Form F3 as currently applied excludes repeatedly displaced populations from accessing funds. Donors and implementing partners should push explicitly for alternative verification mechanisms that do not require identity documents that conflict has made inaccessible.

The broader lesson

Sudan’s ERRs represent something genuinely remarkable: a movement of more than 20,000 volunteers sustaining humanitarian response across 13 states with minimal resources, at extraordinary personal cost. To date, 140 ERR volunteers have been killed during this conflict. They deserve the recognition they have received.

But recognition is not the same as accountability. The humanitarian sector’s commitment to localisation means nothing if the coordination structures we fund reproduce the same patterns of exclusion – geographic, gendered and documentary – that we claim to be addressing. The LCC is not the ERR movement. It is one layer of coordination that sits above it. Understanding the difference, and engaging accordingly, is the minimum that genuine support for local leadership requires.

The ERRs are doing the work. The question for international actors is whether they are supporting the rooms, or just the people who learned to speak for them.

Musab Alshafie Mohamed is a Chevening Scholar and MSc graduate in International Development from the London School of Economics, with eight years of professional experience in Sudan including roles at the African Development Bank and Mercy Corps Sudan. Displaced from Khartoum in June 2023, his research focuses on governance, representation, and localisation in Sudan’s humanitarian response.