Africa: Rethinking Humanitarianism | Grassroots Aid Is Here to Disturb the System

What the report says

AllAfrica highlighted a New Humanitarian podcast episode published on 27 August 2026 that focused on community-led relief and mutual aid as a challenge to the formal humanitarian sector. The discussion featured Fanta Toure, chief executive of Resilio Fund; Hajooj Kuka of Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms; and Bashair Ahmed, founder of Shabaka, in a conversation hosted with Christina Bennett as part of a collaboration with Start Network.

The guests argued that grassroots aid is not a new trend but a long-standing practice rooted in local solidarity, neighbor-to-neighbor support, and collective action. Toure described community response as a return to how crisis support is supposed to work, while Ahmed said the aid system should shift from leading by default to supporting local actors by design. Kuka pointed to Sudan’s decentralized response rooms, which he said have grown into more than 800 groups, including kitchens, kindergartens, clinics, and women’s cooperatives.

A central theme was whether international donors and agencies can back local initiatives without reshaping them in the image of the traditional aid system. The episode also touched on the scale of diaspora remittances and on lessons from feminist organizing and mutual aid networks. The broader significance is that locally led aid is gaining visibility as conflicts and crises expose limits in centralized humanitarian models, even as advocates warn that recognition should not turn into co-option.