A phone call gets a third voice on the line. Three days later, the person on the other end is gone – taken by intelligence officers in the night.
A vehicle is seized at a checkpoint, then the laptops, then the phones, until an organization built to protect women is left with almost nothing to protect them with.
A woman moves house to house for months, sleeping somewhere new each night, because raising her voice for other women has made her a target in her own city.
These are not abstractions. They are Tuesday, in Omdurman and in Goma, for the women whose work this article is about.
There is a particular kind of violence in being indispensable and invisible at once. Two separate countries – Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo – are going through two different conflicts. In each, women are doing the daily work of keeping people safe. They are running the safe houses, and mapping the informal referral pathways that keep survivors alive. They are negotiating with armed men at checkpoints just to move a case file. They are holding the psychosocial line for entire displaced communities.
They are doing this while the peace tables, donor boards, and Security Council briefings that decide their future and the future of the conflicts affecting them almost never include them at all.
Sudan: Leading the response, excluded from negotiations
Three years into a war that has displaced more people than any conflict on earth, Sudan’s formal protection architecture has effectively collapsed.
What remains is the part that was never institutional to begin with: women-led Emergency Response Rooms and grassroots mutual aid networks, now functioning as the only first responders many communities have.
These are not NGOs in any conventional sense. They are neighbors organizing communal kitchens out of what’s left in their pantries. They are informal GBV referral chains held together by trust, not memoranda of understanding. They are mediators — often survivors themselves — talking down local conflicts because no formal actor can reach the area at all. Indeed, Emergency Response Rooms and other women-led organizations in Sudan have played a central role in local peacebuilding.
And yet: not one Sudanese woman has sat as a negotiator in any formal peace process since the war began. Not one. The women trusted with life-and-death decisions at 2 a.m. in their own neighborhoods are shut out of the decisions, made in five-star hotels in other countries, about whether the war that destroyed those neighborhoods will end.
The Peace for Sudan platform — a coalition of roughly 49 women-led organizations — has had to demand something that should never have needed demanding: a seat at the table, 50 percent of it. The demand remains unmet.
DRC: Protecting survivors without a say in the peace process
In eastern DRC, the pattern repeats with its own cruelty. Congolese women’s civil society has operated for years inside one of the world’s most sustained crises of wartime sexual violence, yet women remain locked out of the peace process.
The situation is dire. In government-held territory, a functioning justice system and new legal tools — a new GBV law, a new Family Code — mean a case can still be tracked, referred, and followed through. But cross into rebel-held territory, and nearly all of it disappears. Forced displacement. Exploitation. Early and forced marriage. Survivors too afraid to report anything at all, because there is often no functioning system left to report to.
Despite all this, organizations funded through the Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund have built grassroots, survivor-support networks across South Kivu, documenting conflict-related sexual violence.
And yet once again, these women are left out of the peace process.
In August 2026, roughly 120 members of Congolese civil society organizations gathered — across Goma, Bukavu, Beni, Bunia, and Kinshasa — for a national forum on the ceasefire monitoring mechanism, and used it to demand a defined operational role in early warning and information-gathering inside the mechanisms meant to hold any ceasefire together.
At this meeting, one woman presented a message to the Security Council that was not diplomatic. Neither the Doha process nor the Washington process, she said, has brought the country closer to peace. Pride on one side, radicalization on the other, and in the meantime rebel-held territory has grown larger than Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda combined. She asked for real pressure — on Kinshasa to negotiate, and on armed groups to stop taxing civilians and let humanitarian workers move freely. Not more statements. Peace.
Two wars. Two regions. One design flaw, repeated with grim consistency: the system treats local, women-led response as a supplement to the “real” architecture — the UN mission, the donor board, the formal peace talks — instead of recognizing it as the architecture that is actually functioning on the ground.
Decision-making sits overwhelmingly with people who have never run a GBV referral line at 2 a.m. in an active conflict zone, never negotiated with an armed man at a checkpoint to move a case file, never watched their own equipment seized because a city changed hands overnight.
Localization is not a technical footnote to humanitarian reform. It is the central protection question of this decade. If the organizations closest to the risk — the ones who know which roads are safe tonight, which survivor needs to move houses, which elder can be trusted to de-escalate — remain structurally excluded from governance, funding, and negotiation, then “protection” is a word the system uses to describe an architecture that is, in practice, protecting itself more than it is protecting women and girls.
The fix is not mysterious. It requires a guaranteed seat, not a guest pass, for local women’s organizations in every ceasefire, peace, and coordination mechanism — with a defined mandate and a vote, as Congolese women are explicitly demanding right now.
It requires risk-sharing, not risk-transfer. Local actors currently absorb the security, financial, and reputational risk of frontline work while international actors absorb the funding and the credit.
And it requires recognition that survival is protection work. In these contexts, simply keeping an organization’s doors open under threat of closure is a life-saving act. It should be funded and protected as one.
Every one of these women — is already doing the work the international system claims to be building toward. The frontline is not waiting for the high-level meeting to catch up. It never has been. The only question left is whether the high-level meeting will finally have the courage to catch up to it.
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