DCA Sudan
There is a saying Gamar Mohammed Ahmed returns to on days where things are hard. She says it quietly, almost to herself, as if repeating it keeps something precious from slipping away: “There is nothing like home.”
But the home she has in mind – the house in Khartoum where she raised her six daughters and built a life with her husband – is now empty, stripped bare by war, too dangerous to return to.
Gamar is 45 years old. She has diabetes and hypertension. She carries a blood clot in her leg that makes every ordinary task an act of will.
When fighting erupted across Khartoum on 15 April 2023, she fled with her six daughters – all of them still in school, the oldest preparing for her secondary certificate to White Nile State in central Sudan.
They arrived at the camp, Square 27, for displaced people with almost nothing.
And then they received news that made everything heavier: her husband had been taken hostage.
Overnight she became the only thing standing between her six girls and a world of conflict, danger, and uncertainty.
The Weight of Displacement
The war in Sudan has created the largest displacement crisis on earth. More than 33 million people have been uprooted all over Sudan since the conflict began. But in the settlement of Square 27 in Kosti, White Nile State, displacement has a single, very specific face: it is Gamar, sitting in a borrowed space, calculating whether she has enough left over to keep her girls fed, clothed, and in school.
“I couldn’t find any work,” she says. “I am a mother of six children, all girls, all in school. I was struggling.”
The struggle is not only material. Gamar’s daughters are growing adolescent girls navigating displacement with no access to the basic necessities that young women need. The quiet indignities of poverty have been adding up: missed school days, the anxiety of hygiene needs unmet, the shame that settles on girls when their bodies become a source of discomfort.
Gamar has watched all of it and refuses to accept it as permanent.
A Circle That Listened
It was through Ganonyat, a local women’s mutual aid group, that works in partnership with DanChurchAid and the national NGO, Sudan Social Development Organisation (SUDO), that things began to change. What set this encounter apart was something very simple: the group asked Gamar what she was lacking, and what she needed to help herself get back on her feet. And when she spoke the group listened.
They sat with us and discussed with us our needs and the ways we see fit to address our needs.Gamar
This is the architecture behind an approach known as the survivor and community-led response (SCLR).It is an approach where people affected by crisis become first responders. It shifts power towards the communities and local self-help groups, supported by the Sudan Humanitarian Fund’s in White Nile, Sennar, and Gazira States: community-based, locally grounded, and built on the voices of the people most affected. In Gamar’s case she highlighted one thing that she does well – and something that she could make a small business out of. “I can make tea,” she told the group.
It was a small declaration, but it was a thread back to the person she had been before the war. A skill she had. A memory of normalcy. The project responded in kind. It provided her with what she needed to turn that skill into income: sugar, tea, and milk. With these modest supplies, Gamar opened a tea stand.
Dignity, Quietly Restored
Through the project Gamar got more than a livelihood. Her daughters also received dignity kits.
In the language of humanitarian response, a dignity kit is a package of basic hygiene items – sanitary materials, soap, and other essentials. In the reality of Gamar’s household, it was the difference between her daughters attending school and staying home. Between confidence and shame.
“My girls would have struggled with personal hygiene and women-related needs without them. The kits helped my girls attend school regularly instead of missing classes,” says Gamar.
For six girls navigating adolescence in a displacement settlement, the kits provided something that cannot be measured in units: normalcy. The sense that, even here, even now, their needs matter. That they are seen.
Gamar describes the change in her household with a quiet precision that speaks of someone who has counted every detail: reduced risk of infection, access to soap, fewer missed school days, less anxiety, less isolation, less of the particular stigma that falls on girls when their bodies become a source of worry rather than ordinary life. These are not abstract outcomes. They are her daughters, going to class.
What Has Changed
Today, Gamar’s tea stand provides a steady income. It feeds her family. It has, in her own words, “hugely reduced financial stress” in a household that was, not long ago, in freefall.
For a woman managing three chronic conditions alone diabetes, hypertension, and a blood clot in her leg the reduction in financial stress is not a footnote. It is a lifeline. Stress worsens illness. Income eases it. The project, by giving Gamar a way to earn, gave her body as well as her household a chance to breathe.
Those who met her describe a woman who is “happy and full of life” not despite everything she carries, but as a testimony to what becomes possible when people are supported in ways that respect their agency and their knowledge of themselves.
The Road She Hopes For
Gamar asks for what any mother would ask for: safety. A country her daughters can grow up in and a chance to go home.
“There is nothing like home. I hope my girls get to continue their studies, and that the health system gets better so I can access medication for my diseases,” she says.
The home she left in Khartoum was looted. Even if the war ended tomorrow, returning would mean starting again from nothing. She knows this. And still, she hopes.
In the meantime, she tends her tea stand. She watches her daughters go to school. She counts the small, victories of a life rebuilding itself, one cup at a time.
Sudan’s war has created the largest humanitarian crisis on earth. In the face of it, Gamar Mohammed Ahmed has kept going – for herself and her daughter – in spite of hardships. After displacement Gamar and her daughters were given another chance and the means to seize it. That is what this project does. Not for millions in the abstract, but for one mother, and the six daughters who depend on her.