AN ANGLICAN microfinance charity, Five Talents, has published new research on its work to support people forcibly displaced in South Sudan, to coincide with World Refugee Day on Friday.
Savings Groups and Displaced People in South Sudan: A fresh hope is written by Anne Figge, technical consultant at Five Talents, who has worked in South Sudan since 2013.
The report says that the crisis in South Sudan has caused the displacement of about 2.2 million refugees and two million internally displaced people (IDPs).
Five Talents has adopted a “bottom up approach to community development”, the report says. Savings groups, it explains, enable enterprise development by “encouraging members to borrow from the group’s financial assets in order to start small businesses using their own learned skills, natural talents, agency and effort”.
The report says that “no external financing is given”, and that the savings groups are “self-managed through the process of establishing their own bylaws, electing their own leadership and aggregating only their own small-scale cash savings”.
The Bishop of Aweil in South Sudan, the Rt Revd Abraham Yel Nhial, who was a recipient of UN aid as a child, is quoted in the report as saying: “I don’t want my people to always need UN aid. We have to move past being dependent on aid. This is why the work of Five Talents is so important.”
The charity examined data from 2198 participants in their programmes that ran from 2019 to 2023 in Juba, Central Equatoria. Of these, 87 per cent are female and 13 per cent male. The data were collected via a “group interview format at the beginning and end of the programme year”.
During 2020 and 2021, 98 per cent of participants identified as displaced. This figure dropped slightly to 87 per cent in 2022 and 2023.
The figures show that 7.7 per cent of participants initially “reported having any kind of productive asset (something reusable to help them generate an income) at baseline”, growing to 55 per cent at the “impact survey”.
The report states that “displaced people are made more vulnerable” because “they often are forced to migrate without their physical assets. This means that displaced people have disrupted social and financial safety nets which then undermines their ability to meet their basic needs (food, shelter, access to healthcare and education).”
Since 2007, Five Talents has been working in South Sudan in partnership with the World Concern Development Organisation and the Mothers’ Union. Besides teaching financial skills, the charity also provides adult literacy training and support for the “healing of traumatic stress and community-based peacebuilding”.
Angelina, who fled her home in 2023, said that a savings group gave her “a loan of 10,000 SSP (approximately £2.60). . . The group’s encouragement and support has kept me going.”
The charity notes that “profits from member and community owned businesses support individual households and dependents as well as other vulnerable people, church and community initiatives.”
In a foreword to the report, Lord Curry of Kirkharle, treasurer of the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on Sudan and South Sudan, writes: “Crucially, families are being sustained, children being educated and communities are being refreshed through this vital ‘self help’ initiative. . . Importantly, it is helping to wean communities off unreliable and undependable international aid.
“Through their faith in God they are being encouraged and sustained. Despite being uprooted many are rebuilding their lives, their families and recreating new communities.”
Read the report here.