Community-Led Response for Resilience in South Sudan

Summary

In 2025, the TITI Foundation committed to strengthening communities in South Sudan and Uganda through the Survivor and Community-Led Crisis Response (SCLR) approach by funding survivor and community-led initiatives to enhance resilience building to conflict affected populations. By June 2028, the TITI Foundation will rapidly disburse microgrants based on the needs identified by communities for their own development to impact more than 28,000 people. The SCLR approach will strengthen social cohesion and transfer power, resources, and decision-making to self-organized groups—mainly led by women and youth—in affected populations to serve their own communities while maintaining levels of accountability, compliance, and cost-effectiveness.

Approach

Titi Foundation (TF) and partners will advance the Survivor and Community-Led Crisis Response (SCLR) approach as a sustainable solution to advancing community resilience across South Sudan. Titi Foundation will conduct training to shift their expertise to all the partners for implementation. The SCLR approach is paramount making connections between short term, crisis induced agency and long-term resilience by encouraging and supporting active self-help groups to tackle the root causes of their crisis. The SCLR approach is more responsive to local needs and is cost effective.

Further, Titi will mainstream the SCLR program to facilitate cross learning with the rest of its projects and partners to create a community of practice in the country. The SCLR approach will further impact the communities positively in strengthening social cohesion, as communities are always the first and last responders for their own populations and strengthen their capacities for the already existing local self-help initiatives. The approach will also facilitate power transfer of both resources and decision making to crisis affected populations seeking to help their wider community.

Titi Foundation will implement this SCLR response using various approaches ranging from a key informant interview, or appreciative inquiry, rapid transfer of micro grants to identified community groups, and disseminating knowledge and capacities. This process will allow the participants to acquire financial literacy skills, accountability methodologies and inclusivity and will strengthen the community’s survival, recovery and future resilience.

This will enable large numbers of self-organizing groups targeting mainly women and youths to quickly identify and implement their own self-help initiatives. The approach will progressively go to scale during the different phases while retaining relevant levels of accountability, compliance and cost-effectiveness.

Trainings will be conducted by TF for the partners.This training will focus on ensuring that SCLR approaches and methodologies are understood across all levels of the organization given the emphasis it has on unlearning traditional aid practices and ensuring organizations think differently.

Action Plan

Q4: September – December 2025 – TF and partners will conduct key informant interviews, or appreciative inquiry, to inform the needs and approach to the project with involvement of the community.

Q1: January – March 2026 – Trained TF facilitators, with support from community committee members, will conduct an appreciative inquiry to identify existing voluntary self-help groups already working within their communities, conduct focus group discussions to identify cultural and social norms that can be embedded in the action plans to strengthen conflict mitigation, accountability, protection, inclusion and safeguarding.

Q2: April – June 2026 – Community facilitators will conduct a community mapping exercise to identify pilot sites and existing autonomous self-help groups where TF believes it could best test assumptions and develop learnings in preparation for activities. This exercise will be conducted by the community facilitators who will work alongside selected committees.

Q2-Q4: April – December 2026 – The identified groups will work with the teams who will support the groups to develop their ideas and initiatives. This will be conducted through facilitated workshops and training after which proposed and developed ideas will be submitted to a selected review committee whose role and purpose will be to review the proposed ideas which meets the criteria for support. For the successful groups, TF will disburse microgrants (up to $4500/grant, depending on the project and needs) , accompanied with training on financial management and literacy, small business skills and bookkeeping. The grants will be disbursed through financial institutions to transfer funds to the group accounts. Monthly reports will be shared by the groups. Weekly feedback and lessons learnt sessions will be conducted to strengthen the program through light touch lessons to identify challenges and solutions.

2027-2028: Same activities as above, disbursement of microgrants to additional identified community groups; continued monitoring and support to groups funded pre-2027.

Background

People in South Sudan continue to face conflict, climate shocks, and an economic crisis that have resulted in public health and protection needs.

The Titi Foundation has been working across South Sudan by providing services to crisis affected communities in the sector of water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) , gender-based violence (GBV) , education, food security and livelihoods (FSL) , and community-led programs over the years. Titi Foundation has worked with community-led groups to coordinate local responses, including community-based protection networks, conflict early warning systems, gender based violence and child protection referral pathways, women and youth advocating for internally displaced persons, returnees and individuals with no community links being allowed to access host housing, land and natural resources. These autonomous groups have been at the forefront of meeting acute needs of affected persons prior, during and after disasters. As such, Titi Foundation recognizes the importance of autonomous crisis responses by affected people as one of the most important models of helping communities survive and recover from disasters.

Titi Foundation intends to complement its other aid interventions with Survivor and Community-Led Crisis Response (SCLR) as a means of building gender equality, resilience and development within crisis affected communities. In their localization efforts, Titi Foundation intends to decentralize power, resources and decision-making processes back to the affected populations.

Progress Update

Partnership Opportunities

Titi Foundation aims to mobilize and access additional partner support, bring in new foundations and funders to this cause, and seek wide media support and expertise to both mobilize more resources to the initiative and to educate, promote and build trust in localized aid models in South Sudan and Uganda. Titi Foundation is partnering with local NGOs and groups to respond.,Through this commitment, Titi Foundation offers both local expertise and best practices to a sustainable approach that will pave the way to building community resilience in crisis affected communities instead of being aid dependent.