In Rachel’s most recent Letter From The CEO email, she discusses Wandi, South Sudan, and the impact that savings groups are having on the community there.
South Sudan is the world’s youngest country, and one of its most wounded. I find myself thinking about that often — about what it means to try to build something in a place that has had so little time, and so little peace, to find its footing. We recently received two years of impact data from our programme in Wandi, and I wanted to share it, because the numbers deserve more than a report.
Independence came in 2011, after decades of war that cost an estimated two million lives. Civil war broke out again in 2013, and once more in 2016, when the conflict swept south through Equatoria, triggering what the UN described as the world’s fastest-growing refugee crisis. Today, more than three quarters of South Sudanese live below the national poverty line, and only 35% of adults can read or write. The government spends just 1.5% of GDP on education, placing it 191st out of 193 countries in the world.
Wandi sits within that context, and then some.
It was part of the escape route for anti-government forces during both outbreaks of conflict. Homes were seized, harvests stolen, and gender-based violence against women was widespread and systematic. Nearly 5,000 people in the area are formally displaced. There is one bank in the entire region, no school at all in one of Wandi’s five districts, and roads that are impassable for much of the year. When Five Talents first began working with partners there, the team would travel an hour by motorbike just to reach a mobile signal -a small detail that says something significant about how isolated and underserved this community is. In 2024, we partnered with Mothers’ Union South Sudan to begin literacy groups in Wandi.
Those literacy groups became savings groups in 2025, and the data we have just received covers two years of work. It’s incredible.
76% of members can now read in their mother tongue — up from just 4%. Every single member has joined a savings group, 65% have taken a loan, and repayment rates stand at 99%. 71% have started a new business or income-generating activity. 66% say their household income has increased, and 60% say they can now send their children to school.
In 2024, only 18% of members said they knew anything about women’s rights. By 2026, 93% are actively advocating for them.
And perhaps the most remarkable finding of all: at baseline, 38% of members reported having experienced trauma. By 2026, that figure was 98% — not because things had worsened, but because the trauma healing work had created, for many people, the first safe space they had ever had to name what happened to them. Those with coping strategies rose from 19% to 76%. Reports of improved family relationships reached 91%. Reports of active involvement in community peacebuilding reached 98%.
The people delivering this programme are two women — Eunice and Catherine — who travel by motorbike on roads that regularly defeat larger vehicles, and sometimes continue on foot. Last year, while Eunice was attending a workshop in Nairobi, she received news that communities back home had been told to take shelter overnight in a school or church. When they returned to their homes, they had been looted. Some of those communities, during that enforced night away, had used the time to practice their literacy together.
Before this partnership began, the Mothers’ Union trainers were asked to complete a security assessment. Their response was that insecurity had never stopped the Church or the Mothers’ Union from carrying out their work — and that it was, if anything, a source of motivation.
There is a version of development work that brings external capital, external expertise, and a fixed timeline. It often leaves communities more dependent than it found them. What is happening in Wandi is something else entirely: built from within, owned by the people inside it, and still going.
These results, in this context, in two years, represent something I think is worth pausing and reflecting on. I’m so proud of all that Eunice, Catherine and every member of every savings group in Wandi has achieved, and so grateful to them, and to all of our supporters here in the UK, for making it possible. And with such profound change after just two years, I can’t wait to see what these groups achieve next.
This work is possible because people choose to invest in it.