One Sudanese mutual-aid group’s account of its funding contained two sums: about $109,000 received in grants, and roughly $24,600 contributed from its own resources. The second figure was not another donor’s allocation. It was money the group said it had put into the response itself.
The group appears anonymously in an October study by ODI Global and Shabaka, which withholds participants’ identities for their safety. Across the groups studied, volunteers covered transport, fuel, registration, bank fees and documentation, as well as giving their time. The study does not itemise that particular group’s contribution. Its two figures nevertheless expose something a grant announcement cannot: the money received is not necessarily the full cost of making relief possible.
Other groups’ accounts reveal the choices behind that gap. Funding arrangements can bring resources and freedom to respond. They can also leave local responders covering costs without sharing the decisions.
A host—or a closed door
The ODI–Shabaka researchers gathered accounts from 31 mutual-aid groups in five states. Their October publication uses protective regional labels rather than identifying locations; its figures describe reported funding journeys, not a national audit.
Among 12 groups assigned to the study’s “East” category, money usually arrived intact. The obstacle was getting access to it. Seven named registration, and the bank account it required, as their hardest condition or biggest barrier. Groups paid registration costs themselves, worked through a registered host or lost funding when they could not register in time.
A host could therefore open access, rather than simply stand between volunteers and their funding. An October call from the UN Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund shows one such accommodation in its rules. It invited proposals supporting displaced women in three specified parts of Sudan. Lead applicants had to prove legal registration; co-implementing partners did not. Joint projects were encouraged, with each organisation’s responsibilities specified.
The call also explicitly said applicants need not contribute to the project budget. Alongside project grants, it offered institutional funding intended to sustain organisations themselves. Those provisions show that neither self-financing nor individual registration is an unavoidable condition of every programme. They do not establish an award, or that any group in the study used this particular fund.
Flexible enough to move, too small to count
Some funders use another route. Rather than treating unregistered groups as formal partners, they record them as cash recipients—“beneficiaries”, in the funding system’s terminology.
The ODI–Shabaka interviews describe why that can help. With fewer compliance burdens, money can move between community kitchens, protection and water, or between areas, without a formal project amendment. A lower organisational profile can also protect volunteers.
But the same label can make an organisation delivering relief appear in the system as someone receiving it. The researchers argue that this keeps groups out of allocation figures and decision-making forums. Two groups in their “West” category said they had no power to change how funding reached them.
The trade-off is tangible: flexibility over what to do with a transfer can coexist with little influence over the terms of the next one. Formal recognition may offer another route, but with paperwork and exposure of its own.
More than a delivery service
In a separate February study of 44 women-led organisations, researchers Samia al-Nagar and Liv Tønnessen describe women’s groups combining emergency assistance with work against sexual-violence stigma and exclusion.
Some feminist emergency response rooms had registered as women-led organisations to obtain international funding. Their activities did not fit a neat division between delivering supplies and changing social relations. One organisation described young men distributing sanitary pads door to door, challenging taboos while meeting an immediate need. Referrals, outreach and psychosocial support likewise carried purposes beyond distributing an item.
The researchers also recorded exclusion from strategic decisions, limited training and fragmented coordination. Local knowledge did not eliminate organisational weaknesses. But financing only a delivery function could also miss what these organisations were trying to change through their work.
Even funding that arrives quickly may not sustain that work. Direct international grants in the ODI–Shabaka study’s “North” category generally arrived within a month, with few reported deductions. Two routes through a grassroots coordination body were the region’s fastest and carried no reported deduction. Yet groups lost continuity when grants ended abruptly or projects stopped.
In the study’s “West” category, support from an international NGO, an Islamic almsgiving institution, individuals and the Sudanese diaspora was small and irregular. Only two of the six groups kept working while they waited for funds.