Whose Nexus? When the System Lags Behind Frontline Actors: The Case of the Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs) in Sudan
Congratulations to the Sudanese grassroots Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs), who were awarded the 2025 Chatham House Prize, which is presented to “the person, persons, or organization deemed to have made the most significant contribution to the improvement of international relations.” In this blogpost on the ERRs, Aishwarya Shetty and Faiza Hassan challenge international donors and agencies to follow the lead of local actors, such as the ERR volunteers in Sudan, who are already doing the necessary work. This blogpost is developed from a contribution to the forthcoming Policy Insights collection The Humanitarian-Development-Peace Nexus at 10, which will be launched in a webinar on 9 December 2025. ◉ Register Here. This post is cross-posted to the INEE Blog and the KIX-EMAP Blog.
The conflict in Sudan uprooted over 11 million people and pushed a serious hunger crisis to the brink. Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs) emerged as lifelines in the besieged Khartoum state. Run entirely by volunteers, these neighbourhood-based networks create safe spaces for children to learn and play, provide meals to prevent malnutrition and keep services like water and electricity running. However, the scale of need far exceeds their means. While their work runs on small donations from local and diaspora benefactors, many international agencies remain hesitant to fund community groups and choose to operate in areas with “supposedly less fighting”. Essentially, these ERR volunteers shoulder the responsibilities that the Humanitarian-Development-Peace (Triple) Nexus was designed to support, stepping in when international and state systems fall short.
Promises
In 2016, the UN’s World Humanitarian Summit coined a new way of working. This idea, now known as the Humanitarian-Development-Peace (Triple) Nexus, was simple enough. It meant collective action for collective outcomes over multiple years so that efforts reinforce one another rather than compete. A twin reform, the Grand Bargain, pledged more local leadership, more multi-year flexible funding and slashed red tape so that frontline actors could actually deliver impact where it is needed most.
Yet, nine years after these global pledges, the ERR’s daily juggle of delivering life-saving aid, long-term learning and community healing is, ironically, exactly what the Triple Nexus was supposed to enable. These ERRs, like countless local actors across the world, are already “doing the nexus.” The question is whether the global system can catch up and whether it can learn to genuinely support local leadership, solutions and actors. This mismatch is the starting point and the warning shot for this article.
Fractures
Several conferences, policy briefs, webinars and glossy toolkits echo the same chorus: localise more, coordinate better and fund flexibly. This mantra is usually delivered by those who already hold the purse strings and the podium. We have heard the critique many times before, but today, these are no longer abstract; they show up in very specific pressure points that stall progress everywhere, from donor capital flow to the classroom.
Compliance Bottlenecks Shut Out Local Organisations
“Listen to local voices” sounds hollow when those voices are shut out long before the conversation begins. This is evidenced by the fact that direct funding to local and national actors rose to just 4.5 percent in 2023, a sliver of the Grand Bargain’s 25 percent pledge. Eligibility thresholds and exhaustive compliance requirements keep many community organisations from even stepping onto the playing field, let alone shaping strategy.
In practice, the door closes before local actors have a chance to speak, so the collective action the Nexus promises is forged without those it claims to centre. Whose Nexus is it, really?
The problem is structural. The humanitarian system was not built to share power; rather, it was built to manage and control risk. Changing this will require political will and a full structural redesign. However, the most immediate and practical lever is compliance itself. Donors can’t relax compliance. Taxpayers and boards expect robust safeguards and rightly so; however, they can design it to manage risk without blocking local leadership.
Begin with tiered due diligence: Require lighter, proportional checks for community-based organisations (e.g., verified bank account and reference letters) and reserve full audits for high-value, high-risk grants. Maybe it is time to establish a single passport accreditation valid for three years and recognised by all major donors so that local partners stop drowning in duplicate audits. It is also critical to scale requirements to size and risk: A community-based organisation should have to clear a lighter checklist than a multinational NGO instead of being shut out altogether. True localisation cannot occur until compliance becomes enabling rather than extractive.
Local Leadership Is Undone by Control and Key Performance Indicators
For all the Nexus commitments to shift power to local organisations, most localisation efforts still look like theatre rather than transfer. The mechanics of decision-making remains centralised, budgets are approved far from the crisis, priority themes are set before consultations and local actors are framed as downstream implementers, not leaders. Ground Truth Solutions’ (2025) multi-country survey backs this up: Crisis-affected communities continue to report low levels of trust in aid actors and do not feel more heard or involved.
Why has the power not shifted? Part of the answer to this question lies in how the system judges performance. What gets measured is what gets funded: textbooks distributed, children enrolled and hours of training delivered. The metrics may be tidy, but what actually drives long-term impact in crisis education is far messier: how lessons were co-designed with communities, how teachers mentored each other, how trust was built with local leaders and how programs were re-designed through feedback from the ground. This kind of relational and adaptive work, the core of genuine localisation and capacity exchange (not one-way capacity building), is what underpins resilient education systems.
The sector is full of talk about local participation, so we all agree that it matters. Why, then, is it still underfunded as an afterthought? Rigid logframes and donor-driven key performance indicators (KPIs) leave little room (or budget) for participation. True participation, after all, takes time and money. It requires dialogue, iteration and long-term relationships. These are rarely considered efficient in a system that rewards quick results on limited budgets and limited time.
KPIs, which flood proposals and agreements, are not villains; they simply reflect what we choose to value. We can make KPIs work for participation rather than against it. It is time we consider matching each output metric (what was done) with a simple power metric (who decided), recording the percentage of key decisions that were co-signed by community representatives. Second, each grant should ring-fence roughly ten percent specifically for capacity exchange so that relational costs are no longer treated as optional overheads. Third, funders should build in a no-penalty mid-course review that allows targets to be revised once frontline actors have listened and learned, rewarding adaptation instead of punishing it. Fourth, meaningful community participation must be incentivised, possibly through a modest bonus or a renewal preference. These tweaks retain the discipline of metrics while making space and budget for relational work.
Until our definitions of success value who shapes decisions and how knowledge is exchanged, we will continue to prioritise what is countable over what truly counts.
Coordination that Badges Rather than Builds
Countless alliances, coalitions and partner portals have popped up across the humanitarian landscape, each sporting its own logo and launch webinar. No one doubts that coordination can work. In Cox’s Bazar, the Education Cluster’s joint needs assessment and planning process aligned over 30 partners, reduced duplicative efforts and bridged humanitarian and development actors within months, despite the sticky challenges talked about below.
The broader picture is bleak. Jan Egeland, Grand Bargain Eminent Person, accurately points out that humanitarian reform is now “more cumbersome” because “many more actors demand much more consultation and every change requires lengthy negotiations” (Metcalfe-Hough et al., 2023, p. 4). In other words, coordination has become a branding exercise with plenty of meetings and little momentum. The latest independent review of the Grand Bargain also notes “no broader coordination effort… discernible among donors or between donors and aid-organisation signatories” (ibid, p. 20).
The money trail clearly exposes the problem as it continues to remain wildly uneven. In 2022, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ Haiti flash appeal was 10 percent funded, while Ukraine’s flash appeal hit 88 percent, underscoring how collective mechanisms have not corrected basic allocation inequities. Coordination forums may market solidarity, but money still follows the political spotlight in the Global North.
Coordination mechanisms were largely designed around and by international actors for international actors. This dynamic is particularly exclusionary for local and national actors, despite the fact that these organisations often lead the most integrated responses on the ground. To move from badging to building, we propose three shifts. First, recognise that dedicated coordination takes dedicated time and effort. Apply a small, compulsory, coordination service fee to pooled funds that covers a full-time facilitator, joint needs-assessment teams and a shared monitoring platform. Second, hard-wire local leadership by requiring every education cluster (or equivalent) to have national and local co-chairs with equal veto power. Third, automatically trigger top-ups from pooled funds when any appeal falls drastically short of the global average. These shifts could resource the glue work of keeping potentially competing actors on a shared track, distribute leadership and keep money flowing where need is greatest
Flexible Money that Stops at the Gate
Flexible funding from the donor to the ground is a leaking pipe that is not accidental but is engineered into the system. Yes, donors report larger multiyear envelopes and flexible funding over the years; however, independent reviewers find that “most of the funding that is passed down does not have the same multi-year and/or flexible quality with which it is received” (Metcalfe-Hough et al., 2023, p. 48). A related analysis of localisation finance cites inconsistent and incomplete reporting, vetting rules, banking hurdles and risk-transfer cultures as pressing reasons (Viswanathan, 2023). After going through multiple layers of administrative, overhead and bureaucratic costs, what reaches community schools is typically a six-month, output-heavy micro grant that is too small and focused on the short term to really deliver a sustainable, impactful programme.
Fixing this pipe requires making three hard moves. First, donors should include clear rules in contracts to ensure that flexible funding keeps its flexibility all the way down the chain. At least 60% of grant funding should be passed to partners on the same terms. Second, a small portion of each grant (2% to 3%) could go into a shared risk fund. This would act as an insurance buffer so that agencies do not feel the need to tighten funding rules just to protect themselves. Third, all major organisations should report where the money goes, how long it lasts and how restricted it is using simple, public dashboards. If a flexible grant becomes rigid along the way, it should be flagged. These are just starting points to ensure that flexible finance survives the journey from headquarters to the classroom, where it belongs.
These recommendations are neither silver bullets nor radical demands. These are practical corrections that should be explored to protect the promise made by the Triple Nexus and the Grand Bargain so that it does not collapse under the weight of its own bureaucracy. Local actors, such as the ERR volunteers in Sudan, are not waiting. They are already doing the work. The question is not whether change is possible; it is whether the rest of the system, if donors and international agencies, are willing to follow their lead.
Key Takeaways
- Reform compliance to enable local leadership. Simplify and scale compliance requirements to size and risk using shared accreditation to open funding access for smaller local actors.
- Embed power sharing into performance metrics and budgets. Redesign KPIs and funding structures to prioritise community decision-making, capacity exchange and adaptive programme delivery.
- Shift coordination from badging to building. Implement resource coordination mechanisms, share leadership with local actors and ensure a fair distribution of pooled funds.
- Ensure that flexible funding reaches the frontline. Maintain flexibility through all funding layers, build shared risk buffers and transparently track funding flows to local partners.
The Authors
Aishwarya Shetty, Education Consultant, India
Faiza Hassan, Director, Inter-Network Agency for Education in Emergencies (INEE), United Kingdom