As South Sudan’s Aid Sector Shrinks, Where Does the Risk Go?
Funding cuts are changing the way humanitarian organisations operate across South Sudan. Smaller teams, fewer field offices and greater reliance on national partners and service providers may be unavoidable. But reducing expenditure does not necessarily reduce operational risk. In some cases, it simply moves it elsewhere.
South Sudan’s humanitarian sector is entering a very different operating environment. Funding reductions are forcing organisations to cut programmes, reduce staff, consolidate field offices and look again at the costs of transport, aviation, logistics, security and other operational support.
The financial pressure is clear. The more difficult question is what happens to the programmes that remain.
A recent paper from the Conflict Sensitivity Resource Facility (CSRF) in South Sudan and the Conflict Sensitivity Facility (CSF) in Sudan describes a humanitarian system at a turning point. Its argument is broader than funding alone. Withdrawal, downsizing and reprioritisation are not neutral administrative decisions. They can affect local relationships, institutional capacity and the environments in which humanitarian organisations operate.
The paper is primarily concerned with the wider conflict-sensitivity implications of this transition. But its findings also raise practical questions for those responsible for programmes, operations, security, procurement and duty of care.
If organisations continue to deliver in difficult locations while reducing the infrastructure around those programmes, where does the risk go?
Protecting the programme
There is understandable pressure to protect frontline delivery. If funding remains available for a project in a remote part of South Sudan, organisations will want to use it. Communities still need support, donors expect delivery and organisations are understandably reluctant to withdraw from places where they have spent years building programmes and relationships.
But a programme does not operate in isolation. Behind it sits a less visible structure that allows people to deliver it: experienced staff, assessments, vehicles, communications, security management, journey planning, medical arrangements, logistics and contingency procedures.
As budgets tighten, those costs can become increasingly difficult to protect. A field office closes. A dedicated vehicle becomes a contracted one. Security responsibilities are regionalised. Assessment visits become less frequent. Decisions previously made by people living and working in an area are increasingly made remotely.
None of these decisions is necessarily wrong. Many will be unavoidable. But taken together they create a different operating model, and the assumptions underpinning the previous one may no longer apply.
Less presence, less information
The CSRF/CSF paper identifies a related concern: the erosion of context-specific knowledge. It warns that the loss of experienced national staff can lead to more standardised responses, less nuanced engagement and a greater likelihood of harm.
That has particular relevance in South Sudan, where conditions can differ considerably between states, counties and individual routes. Knowledge accumulated over years matters. Experienced national staff often carry an institutional understanding of communities, authorities, previous incidents, seasonal conditions and local relationships that cannot easily be replaced.
When field offices close and experienced personnel leave, organisations do not only lose infrastructure. They can lose institutional memory with it.
There is a paradox here. As organisations reduce their physical presence, reliable local information arguably becomes more important, not less. Decisions may increasingly be made from Juba or regional headquarters about places where the organisation has fewer people and less direct visibility.
The paper also notes that reductions in subnational infrastructure, including field offices and aviation routes, can weaken monitoring and have wider consequences for local protection arrangements and access.
Where does the risk go?
One of the less visible consequences of humanitarian contraction is risk transfer.
Closing a field office does not remove the risks associated with operating in that location. Outsourcing transport does not remove road risk. Moving implementation to a national partner does not remove the risks associated with delivering the programme.
What changes is who carries them.
The CSRF/CSF paper notes that local entities are already carrying increased burdens relating to risk, information and delivery as international support contracts. It also cautions against placing unrealistic expectations and overwhelming burdens on local actors while wider structural constraints remain.
That distinction will become increasingly important as localisation accelerates.
National NGOs may be ready to take on programmes in locations where international organisations are reducing their presence. South Sudanese companies may be able to provide vehicles, personnel, logistics, security or technical support without the overheads associated with maintaining the same capability internally.
There is considerable opportunity in that transition. But transferring responsibility without transferring the resources and capability required to manage it is something different.
Localisation should not simply mean localising risk.
Duty of care still applies
This also raises questions about duty of care.
A smaller project budget does not make the road safer. A national member of staff travelling to a field location does not require a lower standard of planning because an international colleague is no longer making the journey. A partner organisation's willingness to deliver in a difficult location does not, by itself, establish that the risks have been properly assessed.
As operating models change, some fairly basic questions therefore remain important. When was the location or route last assessed? Who is monitoring the movement? What communications are available? What happens if a vehicle breaks down or a route becomes inaccessible? Is there a realistic medical or evacuation plan? Who has responsibility for responding to an incident?
More importantly, has somebody with the appropriate information and authority actually determined that the residual risk is acceptable?
These are not arguments for preserving every security structure or operating procedure that existed when funding was more plentiful. They are arguments for ensuring that safeguards built into the old operating model are deliberately considered when designing the new one.
Keeping efficiency from becoming a shortcut
There is nothing inherently wrong with finding cheaper ways to operate. In the current funding environment, organisations have little choice but to examine costs closely, and some established operating models may genuinely be unnecessarily expensive.
The distinction is between removing cost and removing capability.
A cheaper vehicle may be entirely suitable. A local provider may be able to deliver a service much more efficiently than an international organisation can maintain it internally. Shared infrastructure and national capacity can produce genuine savings.
But significant differences in price can also reflect differences that are less immediately visible: vehicle maintenance, insurance, driver training, tracking, communications, staff salaries and welfare, supervision, management systems, emergency response and the ability to provide a replacement when something goes wrong.
The same applies across operational services. Two quotations may appear to describe the same service while the infrastructure sitting behind them is entirely different.
This is why the principle that “you get what you pay for” still has relevance, particularly in difficult operating environments. Cheap does not automatically mean poor, just as expensive does not automatically mean good. But when a price is substantially lower, organisations should understand why.
Procurement is part of risk management
As organisations rely more heavily on partners, contractors and national service providers, good procurement becomes more important, not less.
Price will inevitably matter. But procurement also needs to establish what sits behind the price.
That means looking beyond the quotation to the provider itself: its management systems, financial and operational capacity, staff training, insurance, equipment maintenance, health and safety arrangements, incident reporting, safeguarding and ability to respond when circumstances change.
For security providers, there are additional considerations around human rights, recruitment and vetting, training, supervision, use-of-force procedures and incident management.
This is where proper due diligence, contractual oversight and independently audited standards become particularly valuable. Certification does not remove risk, and it should never replace an organisation’s own assessment of a supplier. But credible independent auditing can provide evidence that the systems described during a tender exist beyond the proposal document.
Oversight should also continue after the contract is awarded. A strong tender response tells an organisation what a provider says it can do. Contract management and auditing establish whether those standards continue to be delivered in practice.
A quotation establishes the price. Good procurement establishes what sits behind it.
Localisation should build capability
None of this is an argument against localisation. In fact, the current transition could provide an opportunity to do localisation better.
The CSRF/CSF paper argues that supporting local agency requires more than simply moving funding closer to local actors. It requires recognising the systems, relationships and capacities that already exist rather than treating national organisations as subcontractors within externally driven programmes.
There is a similar conversation to be had about South Sudan’s private sector.
National organisations can retain personnel, vehicles, technical expertise, communications and operational knowledge in locations where individual international organisations may no longer be able to justify permanent infrastructure. That capacity can remain in the country between projects rather than being repeatedly built up and dismantled according to international funding cycles.
But sustainable localisation requires investment in standards as well as contracts. If national organisations are expected to assume greater responsibility, they also need the resources and commercial space to recruit properly, train people, maintain equipment, build management systems and protect their staff.
Driving prices continually down while simultaneously expecting increasingly sophisticated compliance and international standards is unlikely to build sustainable national capacity. At some point, something has to give.
A different model
The humanitarian sector in South Sudan will have to operate differently. Large permanent structures may no longer be financially sustainable, and organisations will continue looking for more flexible ways to maintain access and deliver programmes.
That does not necessarily have to be a negative development.
Vehicles can be contracted when required rather than permanently maintained. Assessments can be commissioned before deployments. Movements can be monitored centrally. Specialist expertise can be brought in when needed. National organisations and private-sector providers can maintain capabilities that individual international organisations no longer need permanently in-house.
Done properly, this could produce a leaner and more locally rooted operating model.
But there is a danger that, in trying to protect frontline programmes, organisations gradually dismantle the operational infrastructure that makes frontline delivery possible.
The CSRF/CSF paper warns against what it describes as “contraction without transformation”: reducing the existing system without sufficiently reconsidering how it needs to work.
That may be one of the most important questions facing organisations operating in South Sudan today.
The question is no longer simply whether there is enough funding to deliver a programme. It is whether there is enough operational capacity around that programme to deliver it responsibly — and, where that capacity now sits with partners and providers, whether organisations have done enough to understand and oversee what they are buying.
As the sector gets smaller, the risk does not disappear. The challenge is ensuring that responsibility, resources and oversight move with it.
Download the full paper here: https://csrf-southsudan.org/repository/csrf-csf-learning-paper-the-humanitarian-system-at-a-turning-point-lessons-from-sudan-and-south-sudan/