Local Leadership in Crisis: Inside Ms. Samia’s Community Kitchen in Khartoum

Each morning in Khartoum’s Karari locality, a line forms outside a neighbourhood restaurant. 

Women arrive carrying plastic and metal containers, placing them carefully on the ground in the order of their arrival. Many balance children on their hips or keep them close as they wait patiently for the doors to open. 

Inside, Ms. Samia,* her daughter Abeer,* and a small team of volunteers are already at work. The same space that serves paying customers in the evening becomes, by morning, a volunteer-run Emergency Response Room (ERR) community kitchen. Throughout the morning, the kitchen prepares cooked fish for families displaced by Sudan’s ongoing conflict. By day’s end, 300–400 households will have received a hot meal—most of them women and children who fled violence elsewhere in the country.  

Amid Sudan's ongoing conflict, community-driven Emergency Response Rooms have emerged as vital, locally led initiatives providing life-saving assistance—a tradition Ms. Samia embodies.

“Many of these families have traveled over 1,000 km from El Fasher in North Darfur. Most are headed by women. The men have been killed or seriously injured, and now the women are struggling to support their families. Many are doing manual labor or selling tea on the streets while their children are begging,” Ms. Samia said. 

We saw the needs in our community, especially among internally displaced people, and we felt a responsibility to help.

Running an ERR—and a Business—Through Crisis 

Ms. Samia has been a prominent businesswoman in Sudan’s fish industry for more than four decades. Drawing on her business infrastructure and experience, she has sustained ERR community kitchens for internally displaced people and returnees in Khartoum’s Karari and Ombada localities. 

Her wealth of experience is evident in how she runs the emergency kitchen. As she oversees the morning’s cooking, Ms. Samia moves seamlessly between sustaining her livelihood and sustaining her community. While checking the cooking and coordinating volunteers, she answers a steady stream of phone calls for her fish business—negotiating orders, giving instructions, and resolving issues. 

The kitchen provides at least one reliable daily meal, offering families a vital sense of stability. The food is of notably high quality—equivalent to commercial standards—reflecting a commitment to dignity and care. Maintaining this standard has required difficult decisions. The kitchen has continued operating even during periods without funding, at times relying entirely on profits from the business to cover costs. 

Ms. Samia and Abeer have experienced the conflict’s fear and uncertainty firsthand. In the early stages of fighting, they were trapped in Khartoum’s Ombada neighborhood, where they operated both a restaurant and a community kitchen, as violence spread and movement became increasingly dangerous. 

When Ombada was no longer safe, they were forced to close their operations and relocate their work to Karari. For the past year, they have provided daily meals to displaced families there, with support from Save the Children through Group Cash Transfers (GCT), recognizing their critical role in reaching displaced families quickly and effectively.

Save the Children partners with ERRs like Ms. Samia’s by providing group cash transfers and capacity-building support, helping to strengthen locally led responses. This approach enables faster, more culturally appropriate aid delivery while supporting longer-term recovery and resilience. 

The ERR model has proven invaluable in Sudan, where insecurity has forced many traditional humanitarian actors to flee cities like Khartoum, making conventional aid delivery impossible.  Sustaining ERRs at their current scale requires consistent support from partners. While volunteers would continue their work regardless, reliable funding enables them to maintain the scope and quality of assistance that displaced families desperately need. This partnership represents a deliberate shift toward localization—empowering existing community leadership rather than building new structures from scratch. 

Beyond Food: The Need for Sustainability 

“I feel content helping the community,” said Abeer, as her mother finished a business call nearby. “But when you see the scale of the needs, you realize how much more is required.” 

While the kitchen plays a critical role in emergency response, Abeer is clear that food aid alone is not enough. “We are volunteers doing what we can,” she said. “But this cannot be the whole solution. Food aid over long periods does not adequately preserve dignity or enable self-reliance. Many people are reluctant to collect meals, despite their needs.” 

Ms. Samia and Abeer hope to expand beyond daily meals toward more sustainable long-term forms of support, such as income-generating activities and, eventually, a space for health services and mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS). 

“We need an exit strategy,” Abeer explained. “Activities are better than just giving food. We Sudanese people have high self-esteem. We are proud.” 

The Role of Emergency Response Rooms 
 

Emergency Response Rooms are youth-driven, community-led initiatives that have become a cornerstone of local humanitarian response across Sudan. ERRs are considered a form of Nafeer,  or ‘a call to collective action’ in Sudanese culture. As volunteers explain, there is no formal structure; it is simply a call to mobilize. In response, people, resources, in-kind assistance, and cash are mobilized.  

Operating across multiple states, ERRs provide hyper-localized, rapid assistance tailored to community needs. Despite facing significant risks—including displacement and targeted attacks—these groups continue to deliver lifesaving support. 

ERRs like Ms. Samia’s demonstrate the strategic value of investing in community leadership as part of emergency programming. Even amid disruptions and inconsistent external funding, they sustain services, preserve community trust, and prioritize dignity by responding to people’s needs from within the community itself. 

Ms. Samia and Abeer’s leadership shows what is possible when communities are trusted to lead—and when humanitarian response builds on what already exists.