Surfing the Wave: A Civic Education Pivot to Support Revolutionary Change in Sudan

When, in late 2018, popular protests against the Sudanese regime turned into a national movement for change, USAID’s Toward Enduring Peace in Sudan (TEPS) faced a challenge. How to ensure USAID support was relevant to Sudanese champions of change in a radically new environment? The USAID TEPS team drew on years of work promoting inclusion and peace in Sudan and developed a civic education initiative to bring activists together in informal, highly interactive training sessions so they could articulate their vision for change, and how to achieve it.

DT Global's USAID TEPS team relied on two major sub-components of USAID’s CLA approach. 1) Staff relationships and networks, in both Khartoum and the 11 States where USAID TEPS works, made the training possible. 2) Continuous learning and improvement allowed the program to adapt and remain relevant. The team designed the initiative as they implemented it. Their inherent CLA approach transformed the challenge of working on new issues, with new partners, into an opportunity to support radical change.

USAID TEPS has CLA in its DNA, continuously learning from marginalized communities. The TEPS team resorted to CLA approaches quite naturally, as a best practice. But it is safe to say that this initiative may not even have emerged had USAID TEPS not been a CLA-infused project. The adaptive, user-driven civic education effort provided relevant skills and tools to hundreds of activists, and thousands more citizens, at a time when little support was on offer. Civic education supported the revolution as it grew and found its voice. It now supports the revolution in its desperate struggle to prevent the 2021 military coup from rolling back the promise of a more inclusive, more just Sudan.