In April 2023, Nala’s life was turned upside down when the war broke out in Sudan, leaving the 45-year-old struggling to get enough food for her three children. By winter 2025, the conflict had escalated, and the family’s situation was worsening. Nala had been hit by shrapnel, causing injuries that left her unable to seek help for her youngest son, who was quickly losing weight.
The kindergartner was facing the most life-threatening form of hunger – severe acute malnutrition – a condition that now impacts more than 700,000 children under the age of five in Sudan, where the war entered its third year last month.
Nala eventually managed to get her son enrolled on one of the 114 UN World Food Programme-funded therapeutic feeding programs for children facing acute malnutrition. With this and medical follow-ups, he reached a healthy weight. For now, Nala’s family is no longer facing the most acute stages of famine.
But the family and those around them still faced a major problem: they lacked access to clean water, leaving them highly vulnerable to waterborne diseases. We at Muslim Aid realised that the problem could not be solved without involving the real first responders to this crisis: the community itself.
Our Sudan office is run by Sudanese staff who have been displaced to Egypt, Rwanda and Kenya, who know what it means to rely on local knowledge when access is limited. They coordinate teams of local volunteers – ordinary people who have been affected by the same crisis and face their own losses – to support families like Nala’s.
These volunteers are sometimes referred to as ‘faith-based actors’ in academic literature. Their faith explains why they serve in the first place, how they’re able to reach more people like Nala; they needn’t be clerics, but their faith is often a reason to act. While they are often the first – and last – responders when a catastrophe strikes, this knowledge is still poorly reflected in how humanitarian systems operate.
As one 2022 article in the Journal of International Humanitarian Action, which looks at the humanitarian system in South Sudan, notes: “Local faith actors are active in responding to crises and want to be linked to the humanitarian system, but they feel distanced from it and pigeonholed as local faith actors.”
In Sudan, Muslim Aid has overcome this challenge by using our credibility and trust to bring local actors into coordinated systems of response, including formal collaborations with the Ministry of Health and structured volunteer networks linked to nutrition and water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) services.
Across the World Food Programme’s 114 feeding centres, which are run in partnership with Muslim Aid, our volunteers have helped us to integrate life-saving sanitation interventions. They not only manage the upkeep of centres, but also spearhead hygiene initiatives, from dispensing cleaning materials to delivering training sessions to community members on how to purify water and improve latrine constructions, which can stop children like Nala’s from relapsing and returning to centres with preventable waterborne diseases.
These interventions have saved Nala from the prohibitive costs of emergency healthcare and transformed her into a health advocate within her own community. She can now pass on skills such as water purification through chlorination and boiling and monitoring child growth through the MUAC (Mid-Upper Arm Circumference) scale within her neighbourhood, through structured community leadership and an organised base of volunteers.
Their work means that when Sudan finally sees peace, the Ministry of Health will have enhanced its capacity to respond and run its health system independently, without us.
