Over the last 16 months, since April 2023, Sudan has experienced a conflict resulting in the world’s largest internal displacement crisis, with over 10 million people becoming displaced. This level of displacement has led to catastrophic levels of food insecurity, with an estimated three-quarters of a million people facing famine. It is also estimated that in the last year, over 19 million displaced children have been deprived of access to education.
Commonwealth Alumnus Sibongani Kayola is the Country Director of Mercy Corps in Sudan, a global team of humanitarians working on the front lines of today’s biggest crises in over 40 countries.
Helping as many people as possible
The scale of the crisis in Sudan has placed significant strain on humanitarian agencies operating on the front line. Bureaucratic and administrative impediments to delivering humanitarian assistance mean front line workers cannot access all the areas where aid is needed, with significant amounts of time spent negotiating access instead.
Sudan is the third-largest country in Africa and Sibongani’s team of 130 people is working across 6 of its 18 states. As head of Mercy Corps in Sudan, Sibongani is responsible for providing strategic leadership to ensure the organisation aids Sudanese communities to help mitigate the crisis. This includes ensuring that all programming is legal and responsive to the needs of communities, as well as managing strategic partnerships with donors and other stakeholders to continue to advocate for increased attention in Sudan.
“Ensuring that we have an operational footprint allows us to help as many people as possible, bearing in mind the humanitarian principles of humanity, impartiality, independence, and neutrality.”
Creating tailored solutions
Mercy Corps is delivering a 10-year strategy, Pathway to Possibility, that focuses on four thematic areas: economic opportunities for populations, water and sanitation access, ensuring food security, and interventions in the peace and governance space. Each country contextualises the global strategy to suit their operational context.
Sibongani notes that Sudan has faced long-term humanitarian needs and that prior to the current crisis, some long-term interventions were already in place and designed for a more stable context. The current crisis and its scale, however, has stripped away stability in certain parts of the country making some of these interventions now less appropriate.
Since April 2023, Sibongani has spearheaded the redesign of Mercy Corps’ strategies in Sudan to best address the needs of impacted communities and ensure the safety and well-being of staff.
“It meant going back to the drawing board and figuring out, from an intervention perspective, what types of interventions are best suited to certain parts of the country, and ensuring that, in those parts of the country, we could deliver immediate assistance.”
One example Sibongani shares is the introduction of cash and voucher assistance for people to buy food from a market, as opposed to providing seeds which will only allow access to food in six months’ time. This also addresses the impact of rapidly changing conflict lines, which mean people are constantly on the move and not able to cultivate land over a long period of time.
Sibongani is now supporting the development of the Cash Consortium of Sudan, a collaborative initiative involving multiple humanitarian organisations to provide cash-based assistance to vulnerable populations in Sudan. The primary goal of the consortium is to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and reach of cash transfer programmes, as well as facilitating better coordination amongst humanitarian actors to avoid duplication of efforts and ensure comprehensive coverage.
Identifying and overcoming challenges
Sibongani has proven expertise in delivering cash transfer programmes, as evidenced in her immediate past role as a Programme Manager and subsequently Country Director of GiveDirectly in Liberia. GiveDirectly is a non-profit organisation (NPO) which enables donors to send money directly to the world’s poorest households.
Sibongani joined GiveDirectly at the start of its delivery in Liberia and was the second employee recruited to set up its field operations in country. Prior to this, the organisation had successfully delivered digital payments programmes in East Africa (Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda). These countries had significantly more advanced digital payments infrastructure than in West Africa at the time and initial scoping work on how to implement operations in Liberia were discouraging.
“In initial scoping conversations, peer cash implementers emphasised that a solely digital programme was not possible at 10,000 household scale in Liberia. Multiple went so far as to tell us we would fail and be forced to resort to physical cash distribution.”
Liberia has experienced two periods of civil war between 1989-1997 and 1999-2003. These wars have significantly stunted the development of important infrastructure, including education, roads and digital infrastructure. This posed an immediate challenge to implementing the GiveDirectly model used in East Africa in a country which was both contextually different and from a social development perspective, less advanced.
A second challenge identified was the geography of Liberia. Extended rainy seasons and limited roads and transportation mean that for six months of the year, many people may be cut off from markets and vendors where they can access digital cash.
As Programme Manager, Sibongani was responsible for translating GiveDirectly’s model to the Liberian context. This entailed building relationships with digital payments’ providers in Liberia and understanding each other’s needs to develop a pilot.
Following a successful pilot in which the 10,000 household target was met, within her 4-year tenure, Sibongani has grown GiveDirectly’s work in Liberia from a mobile-money-based cash transfer proof-of-concept to the country’s largest social protection programme, delivering cash directly to over 160,000 Liberians.
Innovative solutions for complex problems
Notably, under Sibongani’s leadership, GiveDirectly implemented the largest USAID-funded cash transfer programme in West Africa in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, they were chosen as the preferred programme provider for cash transfers by the Liberia Ministry of Gender, Children, and Social Protection, further demonstrating Sibongani’s and the organisation’s ability to manage large-scale programmes.
“A key aspect of my various roles at GiveDirectly was developing innovative solutions to complex problems, and this is a skill I honed… Through my work in Liberia, I demonstrated that it is possible to overcome the institutional, governance, and operational challenges of implementing large-scale social protection programmes in fragile states.”
A further example of this work includes the development of a universal basic income (UBI) pilot in Maryland, Liberia’s most remote county. The programme was launched in 2022 and aims to provide every adult in the county living below the extreme poverty line basic income for 3 years. In doing so, the programme hopes to enable communities to stabilise their finances, invest in income-generating activities and plan for the long term.
UBI relies on universal identification and statistical data on the number of adults within a geographic unit. At that time, Liberia did not have a universal identification system and had not conducted a census in over ten years. As well as being Liberia’s most remote country, Maryland was also the least serviced in terms of mobile phone connectivity, further adding to the challenges of the programme.
In response to the immediate issues regarding identification, Sibongani sought a partnership with the government and the country’s National Identification Registry, who shared that universal identification was a priority but there was no funding available to deliver this. In response, Sibongani built a business case for funding from GiveDirectly which was approved and enabled her to work with the National Identification Registry to identify and enrol all eligible adults to the programme, whilst providing important census data for wider government operations.
Partnerships with mobile network operators is an important part of GiveDirectly’s telecommunications model. Through lengthy negotiation, 10 new cell towers were constructed, bringing mobile network access to over 2,400 adults across 21 villages in the county for the first time. As a result of her innovative thinking, problem solving and stakeholder engagement, the programme and infrastructure now supports universal identification, UBI and enhances connectivity and access to banking services for a remote county.
Reflecting on the impact of this work, Sibongani shares:
“My work on the UBI project in Maryland County, Liberia, and broader work in the country have significantly impacted the lives of recipients by providing financial stability, improving infrastructure, and promoting financial inclusion. These efforts help lift communities out of poverty and empower individuals to build better futures.”
Reflections on mentality
Sibongani credits her advanced education and Master’s at the University of Oxford through a Commonwealth Scholarship with providing her the tools and knowledge to address complex challenges, particularly in fragile and conflict-affected states. She notes that her Scholarship boosted her confidence and leadership abilities which have become integral to her work and in driving positive change.
As a leader, she cites the importance of believing in the seemingly impossible to support team members to strive for excellence and in constantly questioning and challenging things. These are qualities she hopes to further develop and demonstrate as her career progresses.
“My mentality is, never give up, just keep going, keep looking for opportunities. And I will say that has really kept me going through the most difficult of challenges because there are many days when I feel like, OK, this is too hard, I think I should give up now. But that grit always comes to the surface and says, well, it may not be possible this way, can we think about it another way.
“For me, at this point, I think if I were to have a one-line tag phrase, it would be ‘nothing is impossible. You just think about it differently.’”
Sibongani Kayola is a 2016 Commonwealth Scholar from Zambia. She completed an MSc in Evidence-Based Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation at the University of Oxford.
