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Three years ago, conflict erupted in Sudan, and its toll continues to be devastating. The crisis has caused profound human suffering and dismantled the systems households once relied on to absorb shocks. The financial sector has been hit hard: liquidity has dried up, infrastructure destroyed, and social protection mechanisms unraveled.
Humanitarian actors have scaled up cash assistance, but face serious obstacles: limited liquidity, fragmented financial service providers, and complex payment processes. This has resulted in accumulated delays of up to 200 days in delivering cash transfers in the midst of a severe humanitarian crisis.
In this episode, we explore an emerging solution: the Shared Distribution Network (SEND), designed by CGAP and the Cash Consortium of Sudan to cut delays and improve cost-effectiveness.
Featured Voices
- Rayan Nimir, Policy and Advocacy Advisor, Collective Sudan (formerly, Cash Consortium of Sudan)
- William Cook, Senior Financial Sector Specialist, CGAP
- Hiba Al-Madani, a cash transfer recipient and small business owner in Sudan
Producer: Lamis Daoud, CGAP External Affairs Officer
Audio Editor and Sound Producer: Samantha Malhotra, World Bank Group Interactive Media Program
Executive Producer: Jahda Swanborough, CGAP Communications Lead
© CGAP/World Bank, 2026
Special thanks to Sara Murray from CGAP for her expertise and insights that brought this episode to life, the CCS for conducting the interview with Hiba Al-Madani, and Samah Salman for dubbing Hiba’s contribution.
Listen and subscribe for free on your favorite platform. To learn more, visit www.cgap.org. If you have any feedback, connect with us at podcast@cgap.org.
Transcript
Rayan Nimir: When the war broke [out] in Sudan, financial systems collapsed. And people didn't just lose the banks; they lost their ability to interact with the economy around them. So, imagine, trying to buy food or pay for medicine or send money to a relative, when banks are destroyed and cash is scarce. That's the reality of many Sudanese people.
Lamis Daoud: Since April 2023, fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces, which is the official national army, and paramilitary groups, most notably the Rapid Support Forces, has devastated the Sudanese capital Khartoum and spread across Darfur and Kordofan.
This has caused immense human suffering. Beyond the visible damage, it has also dismantled the systems people rely on to survive shocks. It's is especially visible in how people access and use money. Liquidity has dried up. Infrastructure has been destroyed. And the systems that once helped families cope—like the banking and payments systems—have unraveled. In this context, cash transfers have become a lifeline.
Hello and welcome to this episode of Inclusive Finance Frontiers, a podcast by CGAP. I’m your Lamis Daoud, Lamis Daoud.
Humanitarian organizations have been scaling up support since the start of the crisis in Sudan, but delivering cash transfers is far from simple. Limited liquidity as a result of a fragile and disconnected financial system makes it harder for humanitarian organizations to scale up their support. The result? Delays, rising costs, and real challenges in reaching people at scale. In short: too many actors, too many systems, and not enough coordination.
Low liquidity in the financial markets in Sudan (or what is left of the system) makes it harder for humanitarian organizations looking to scale up their support. But one emerging solution holds a lot of promise: the Shared Distribution Network, or SEND for short. It is under development by CGAP and the Cash Consortium in Sudan, sometimes referred to as the CCS.
The Consortium was established in July 2023, three months after the conflict broke out in Sudan. It brings together 19 organizations to deliver cash assistance more efficiently, while also strengthening local delivery systems and generating evidence for what works.
We spoke with Rayan Nimir, Communications Lead of the Consortium, to understand what this crisis looks like in people’s daily lives and how SEND can help.
Rayan Nimir: When the war broke [out] in Sudan, financial systems collapsed. And people didn't just lose the banks; they lost their ability to interact with the economy around them. So, imagine, trying to buy food or pay for medicine or send money to a relative, when banks are destroyed and cash is scarce. That's the reality of many Sudanese people.
Lamis Daoud: It’s not just an inconvenience—it’s a complete breakdown of everyday life. So, what exactly happened to the financial system? Rayan breaks it down.
Rayan Nimir: The national banking switch collapsed when the fighting reached Khartoum. That means interbank transfer were impossible for a long period. Many bank branches were destroyed and cash was looted, cutting a lot of populations from accessing the formal systems. And in many parts of the country, there is not enough cash circulating in the local markets. So, moving cash from one location to another location is extremely difficult and insecure.
Lamis Daoud: Hiba Al Madani, a widow with 4 daughters, is originally from Tuti island in Sudan. She told us her story of displacement, resilience, and rebuilding—using a cash transfer to restart her small business.
Hiba Al Madani: I’ve been working from early on, from before the war in baking. I started after my husband died. Little by little, work picked up. Following the war, work has been slow. There’s hardly any work with all the fighting happening, the shootings, and limitations in moving around. Work stopped.
We left to Sennar and stayed in Sennar for around 9 months. I tried in Sennar to work. I took my things with me, hoping to work wherever we end up.
But we had to leave Sennar and all my things were stolen.
When we got to Omdurman, I tried to return to work but the circumstances of displacement are hard. It drained all our resources.
Lamis Daoud: A few months later, Hiba received a cash transfer.
Hiba Nimir: When we received the cash, I felt so happy. Because I have been thinking about what to do. Doors seemed to close in my face, and I had no way to make money. But when I received the cash, I got a phone, trays, and what I needed to restart my baking business.
Lamis Daoud: While cash transfers are essential in times of crisis, delivering this aid is increasingly difficult. Conflict-related disruptions to the financial sector include damaged infrastructure, weakened banking networks, loss of skilled workers, reduced investment, and challenges with international payment channels. These disruptions cause delays, higher costs, and bottlenecks in getting funds to those who need them most.
We spoke with William Cook, Senior Financial Sector Specialist from CGAP, to better understand the state of the financial ecosystem. William’s work focuses on payments, financial market infrastructure, and digital business models and has been leading research at CGAP for over three years around inclusive finance in fragile countries.
William Cook: In Sudan today, you have over fifty humanitarian organizations, bilaterally contracting and engaging with financial institutions who themselves have limited capacity from the past years of conflict. For the Cash Consortium of Sudan, the partnership of international NGOs, these challenges have led to an accumulated two hundred days of delays across their partners. And this is exacerbated in the sense that each of these international NGOs and are separately contracting, financial institutions for delivery. So that's, banks, and telecommunications companies offering mobile money, microfinance businesses, and others. They're contracting in parallel and having to also do individual management and reporting and the processing of those payments.
Lamis Daoud: And for families waiting on that support, that delay can be devastating.
Rayan Nimir: In displacement camps, we have spoken to families who manage assistance very carefully just because they don't know when the next one will arrive. When we talk about delays in cash delivery, we don't just talk about operational challenges, it's also about how people coping with hunger, debt, and unsafe work and other protection risk while they are waiting.
Lamis Daoud: So, the question becomes: how do you deliver cash quickly, reliably, and at scale in a system that’s this fragile?
One emerging solution is the Shared Network for Distribution in Sudan or SEND. At its core, SEND is a coordination layer, as Rayan explains.
Rayan Nimir: The main problem that SEND was designed to address is fragmentation. In traditional a cash delivery, each organization builds its own operational pipeline to financial service providers with its own contracts, payment formats, reconciliation processes, and reporting systems. For financial service providers, it also means managing multiple different systems from different agencies. And for the humanitarian sector, it means there is very little shared visibility into real capacity and of the financial service providers who can deliver where and at which capacity, and where the bottlenecks could be created. So, SEND solves this by standardizing how organizations interact with providers, allowing many agencies to send payments and receive reporting through a common structure while still using their own program systems.
Lamis Daoud: Put simply, instead of everyone building their own pipeline, SEND creates a shared one. And that matters, because in a crisis, speed isn’t just efficiency—it’s survival.
William Cook: Shared delivery systems like SEND in Sudan help with this collaboration. So they help to reduce duplication in contracting and in payment processing, helping humanitarian organizations to reach end recipients more efficiently, more effectively with aid. In turn, this helps to bring down costs and to increase speed. It also helps to open up the most difficult to reach parts of the market for humanitarians.
This isn't to say that shared solutions are easy. Anytime you're asking organizations with their own mandates and priorities, incentives to collaborate on, on shared solutions, there are compromises that need to be made. But this is why governance is so important.
So, CGAP has spent a lot of time thinking about the ownership, the rules, and how all of this can be created in a way that's maximally transparent and fair to all the organizations involved. This allows organizations to collaborate where there are efficiencies to be gained, like in payment delivery or contracting of financial institutions, while also still maintaining independence where the organizations need it.
Lamis Daoud: Similar models—like the Common Cash Facility in Jordan—have helped improve how aid reaches Syrian refugees. What SEND shows is that even in the most fragile contexts, coordination is possible.
William Cook: Collaboration on payment delivery has the potential to improve efficiency, as we've seen cost effectiveness, time, helping scarce humanitarian funds stretch further. We've seen this in Jordan. We're starting to see this also in Sudan. And here, the analogy to the social protection world is actually pretty strong.
Over recent years, the World Bank and other partners have championed this idea of a whole-of-government approach to payments called G2P or government-to-person payments. This involves things like single treasury accounts on from the government funding side, a shared management information system for processing payments, and the choice of financial service providers for end recipients. And really, what we're seeing with the program mentioned in Jordan and what we're seeing with SEND is really an analogous story on the humanitarian side, where we're seeing similar value in collaboration on payments as what we've seen through the social protection and G2P worlds.
Lamis Daoud: And William explains that for development funders, supporting platforms like SEND offers an important opportunity to invest in the future of shared infrastructure where they might not otherwise have an entry point.
William Cook: Many fragile and conflict-affected states struggle more than others in developing these shared architectures for G2P payments, and that might be because of low capacity, because of sanctions on the country, non-recognition of government, and even changes in that status over time. That back and forth can make systems building over time with government difficult. So when CGAP looks at a solution like SEND or the cash facility in Jordan, we're viewing it not only as solving an immediate humanitarian challenge, but also helping to develop that local capacity and local technologies that, when built with those principles of G2P payments in mind, can hopefully plant the seeds of local systems for when development programming is able to ramp up again, helping us not to lose valuable time in waiting for better times and for development actors to reinvest in the country.
Lamis Daoud: So, what must be addressed next and what does success look like?
William Cook: In the short term, for a solution like SEND, success looks like bringing increased efficiency to the market and decreasing costs for humanitarians, addressing these immediate challenges and bottlenecks and I think we're already starting to see this in Sudan, and as mentioned, we've seen it in Jordan. Um, in the longer term, I think success looks like using this opportunity to invest in the future of Sudan. That means being willing to create those building blocks that development partners, that social protection programs can later use to build with and build upon to accelerate progress on payments in the country.
Lamis Daoud: And Rayan reminds us that solving for documentation challenges is essential.
Rayan Nimir: The same groups that were already marginalized before the war are the one who are facing the biggest barriers right now. we conducted a survey with nearly ninety thousand households receiving assistance. About, fifty-eight percent of them had no formal of identity, and only a quarter had a national ID. So without documentation opening bank accounts or accessing digital services becomes extremely difficult. Women also face additional barriers because documentation is often registered under male members. Displaced people frequently use their IDs while they're fleeing violence. And in rural areas, there's are simply no banks, no connectivity, and very few smartphones. So here, financial ex-exclusion in Sudan is not about the property, it's also about the documentations, the geographies, the gender, the connectivity, and all of these dynamics and structural barriers that interact in a conflict environment or setting.
Lamis Daoud: Sudan has been a largely cash-based economy. Only 35% of adults in Sudan had an account according to Global Findex 2021. Ultimately, cash transfers and solutions like SEND aren’t just about delivering aid today. They’re about building the systems that will support recovery tomorrow.
William Cook: Not only do cash transfers provide an important source of financial resilience for recipients, but they often also serve as their first experience with formal financial services. This means that a first experience with a digital account or with an agent may be through a cash transfer program. This is especially important because those first experiences that recipients have with accounts can make or break their perceptions and their trust in these services in years to come.
That’s the end of our podcast today. Thank you so much to Rayan and Will for speaking to us and to Hiba for sharing her experience with the cash consortium.
And of course, thank YOU, for joining us for this episode of Inclusive Finance Frontiers, a podcast by CGAP. I’m your Lamis Daoud, Lamis Daoud.
For more information on our work in inclusive finance and other topics, please visit our website at cgap.org.
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