Informal Social Protection Networks & Resilience in Conflict-Affected Contexts: Lessons from South Sudan and Yemen

Studies from a variety of contexts make clear that much of the assistance that crisis-affected households and individuals receive does not come from international aid agencies or governments, but rather from their own networks: neighbors, friends, relatives, and in some cases broader groupings of kin such as clans or ethnic groups. In the face of a disaster, households’ social connections and the resources available through their own networks are central to their capacity to endure and recover. Local networks are often better able to quickly coordinate disaster response and post-disaster recovery than formal aid actors. Whether the crisis is a natural disaster or man-made, informal social protection networks are powerful sources of resilience. Indeed, much of the evidence base points to a reality in which communities are often their own first responders during and following crises.

However, to date, aid actors have paid little attention to the ways in which external assistance may either strengthen or undermine informal social protection networks. Despite the growing recognition of the critical role played by informal support systems and calls for more localized approaches to aid, the aid community continues to operate in ways that are largely externally designed and divorced from locally-led support networks. The aid community is currently contending with unprecedented need, funding gaps, and the compounding threats of climate change, conflict, and COVID-19. In this context, leveraging and strengthening informal support systems is an untapped opportunity and resilience imperative for aid actors to maximize impact, as they look to do more with less. The cost of continuing to do business as usual is too high to ignore. Working with and through informal support networks provide critical opportunities for aid actors to more effectively program their responses, particularly in complex environments like South Sudan and Yemen. However, there remains a limited understanding of how aid actors can work to strengthen informal support systems in their mandate.

In this synthesis, Mercy Corps draws on two studies, The Currency of Connections: Why Do Social Connections Matter for Household Resilience in South Sudan? and Sharing to Survive: Investigating the Role of Social Networks During Yemen’s Humanitarian Crisis, to offer key lessons and recommendations for aid actors to better account for and help strengthen such informal support networks. In South Sudan and Yemen, respectively, The Currency of Connections research initiative and Sharing to Survive study investigated the following research questions:

1. What is the nature of informal social protection networks in protracted crises? How have conflict and displacement affected these networks?
2. What role do these networks play in households’ ability to cope and survive in the face of shocks and stresses?
3. How do external interventions interact with local systems of coping and recovery?

While much work remains to assess how effectively the proposed recommendations work to leverage and strengthen informal support systems, they offer promising entry points for the aid community.

The synthesis is organized around three key evidence-based lessons for aid actors to better account for and strengthen informal support networks. For each lesson, the synthesis cites examples from South Sudan and Yemen and corresponding recommendations for the aid community. While the synthesized findings and recommendations are from research conducted in South Sudan and Yemen, they are broadly relevant to other contexts similarly affected by protracted crises. Moreover, while both studies were conducted in emergency contexts where humanitarian assistance dominates the aid landscape, insights and recommendations remain wholly relevant for the broader aid community grappling with how best to design and implement longer-term interventions in protracted crisis settings.