For the last three years, a group of organizations in South Sudan has been calling the shots.
They came together nearly five years after the Grand Bargain of 2016: a promise made by donors, organizations, and governments that more humanitarian funding would be steered toward local groups. At the time the organizations linked up, it still felt like that ambition was decades away — so the Local Response Pooled Fund was created to speed things up.
“We decided to organize our house as national NGOs because the song has always been that we don’t have capacity, or the right systems, or the proper mechanisms,” said Rombek Rombek, the chairperson of LRPF. “So, we came together to discuss exactly what we need to do, as local NGOs, to meet international standards.” And more importantly, he added, to get funding to those closest to South Sudan’s problems.