Africa: Yes, the Nexus Is Real. but It Needs a Radical Overhaul

Maputo, Mozambique — The collective response to the refugee crisis in Chad shows what works, and what needs to change.

The nexus isn’t a myth. The response to the refugee crisis in eastern Chad is a rare example of a joined-up approach to humanitarian and development challenges.

Since war broke out in Sudan last April, more than 750,000 refugees and migrant returnees have fled to eastern Chad. They joined more than 400,000 people still displaced in Chad since the Darfur genocide of the 2000s.

The aid response this time around has been palpably different.

Early on, the government sounded the alarm about the need for a massive development response to accompany the short-term intervention aimed at new refugees.

Key UN figures came on board, advocating for development aid alongside humanitarian action. The World Bank kicked in with $340 million in funding, which opened the door for assistance that strengthened social support and helped both host and refugee communities – on top of life-saving relief.

This collaboration has upended the conventional wisdom that the nexus approach is just for protracted situations, showing that it is equally applicable in quick onset crises.

To be clear, the situation remains fraught, amid signs that genocide may again be unfolding next door in Darfur. Chad’s health minister this week called for more international help to respond to its overlapping refugee and food insecurity crises, worsened by conflict and climate shocks. But by collaborating and thinking beyond emergency aid alone, the government and aid actors may have averted – or at least lessened the risk of – a longer-term catastrophe from unfolding in eastern Chad.

This collaboration has upended the conventional wisdom that the nexus approach is just for protracted situations, showing that it is equally applicable in quick onset crises.

The question is whether the aid sector can translate the lessons from the joint response in Chad to other crises – and transform itself for the challenges ahead.

This is the age of the polycrisis, where conflict, poverty, climate change, displacement, food insecurity, and disease reinforce each other. The aid system needs to rethink how it responds – and this means taking a hard look at the nexus approach to acknowledge what hasn’t worked, and plot a path forward with what has.

What went right in Chad

I worked in Chad as Sudan’s civil war exploded. As displacement from Sudan surged, aid agencies in Chad mounted a huge humanitarian response to relocate refugees away from the border and provide them assistance in newly established camps.

It quickly became apparent that there would be more than a short-term, humanitarian impact. Chad, one of the world’s poorest countries in terms of GDP, has maintained an open door policy for refugees. But its government is concerned about the serious impact of the crisis on host communities in eastern Chad.

One in three people in eastern Chad is now a refugee. The influx of refugees has caused price hikes and strained already weak public services, while presenting a risk to social cohesion and the delicate balance among communities.

UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed gave the issue an international stage in July 2023, using a high-level UN mission to draw attention to “the needs of the millions of vulnerable Chadians”, on top of the immediate refugee response.

In September, the World Bank’s managing director and the head of the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, staged a joint visit to Chad to underline the developmental impact of the crisis. The World Bank subsequently announced its funding – injecting much-needed development assistance early in the crisis response.

The government of Chad developed an integrated plan – humanitarian, development, and peace – for the response to the Sudan crisis. And the UN’s resident coordinator established a new strategic coordination group to convene all the key actors, in recognition of the multi-dimensional nature of the crisis.

Treating the response in Chad as purely a humanitarian problem would have ignored the long-term development consequences, and could have increased tensions at a time when Chad has been going through a delicate political transition.

Hard truths and the need for new approaches

The challenges in Chad remain immense. But can the broader aid system learn from what happened in Chad, and other crises facing similar issues, to propel the so-called humanitarian-development-peace nexus?

This will require some hard questions about the system’s roadblocks, and a willingness to recognise the urgency for change.

The aid system has not reinvented itself to respond effectively to polycrises. The current efforts to ensure a more coherent approach, through the nexus, are not yet having a tangible impact.

The assumptions on which the nexus was built simply aren’t valid and experience points to the need for a reevaluation of the concept. The system needs to be designed differently.

Forget the name, focus on the goal

First, we don’t have the language to articulate what a joint response should be to a multi-dimensional crisis. We still use compartmentalised terms like “humanitarian” and “development”, even when the distinction of these concepts is arbitrary.

Evaluations show that humanitarians still misunderstand “nexus” as a concept, despite reams of guidance and years of training. How do you define the peace aspect of the triple nexus? Climate change should probably be added, but there probably isn’t the bandwidth.

The problem is that the nexus is an “approach”, not a “goal” that everyone can align behind. The last thing the aid sector needs is more concepts and jargon, but we do need the right language to describe the collective effort of what international actors are trying to achieve in crisis settings.

If “nexus” is too vague, then the simple term “crisis response” may be the most straightforward. It gets rid of the distinction between humanitarian, development, peace, or whichever categorisation the aid sector chooses. These silos are meaningless to people in crisis, who may want food or cash today, and seeds or jobs tomorrow.

Hardcode collaboration into the planning of crisis response

Second, there is no unified planning and operational framework to bring all actors together under a single crisis response plan. The nexus approach promotes greater collaboration between humanitarian, development, and peace actors, while accepting that each still has their own separate strategies and planning.

The problem is not the lack of links between the different silos in the aid architecture, but the silos themselves.

Unless these different actors are engaged in a joint undertaking, simply trying to promote greater coordination between separate workstreams will not lead to transformative change. A more radical shake-up is required. There must be a common planning framework, that involves every actor participating in crisis response, and that ties them into a collective endeavour.

Coordinate based on how people use aid

Third, current coordination mechanisms are not designed to bring the relevant actors together to address the interrelated nature of humanitarian, development, and peace challenges. The creation of nexus working groups tends to isolate discussions: Technical experts dedicate their time to pilot nexus projects, rather than bringing about systemic change across the entire aid operation.

While humanitarian coordination mechanisms are well established, those for development aid – especially at the local level – are often non-existent. Given that they involve the same sectoral actors as for humanitarian assistance, they could be significantly integrated and streamlined.

There is now a push towards people-centred and bottom-up approaches to coordination that take as a starting point crisis-affected populations’ priorities, rather than what agencies are able to provide in terms of assistance. Communities in crises have problems that need addressing and labelling them humanitarian, development, peace or any other term is often meaningless to them. There are better models for coordination that are more geared to what communities want, and that don’t reinforce silos.

Make funding more coherent

Fourth, funding to crisis-affected countries is completely incoherent despite donor commitments to the contrary.

The countries most affected by climate change receive the lowest level of climate financing. Places where poverty levels are highest receive the smallest amounts of development aid per capita. Humanitarian aid has increased in scope and been used as a Band-Aid to address structural problems, which prompted the scaling back of the global appeal in 2024. Development cooperation is meant to take over from humanitarian aid in transition settings, but rarely is large enough to do so. Recipient countries get stuck in a “nexus funding trap”, where short-term, emergency aid is shrinking but long-term development aid hasn’t stepped up.

With skyrocketing needs and diminishing funding, the system needs new ways to finance crisis response. There is no magic money tree, but funding decisions could be streamlined and made more effective.

Donors should agree to a joint funding strategy in crisis-affected countries that demonstrates the coherence between their different funding instruments and uses scarce resources in the best possible way. The Swiss Development Cooperation has already merged its humanitarian and development departments. Other donors should consider doing the same.

There should also be a new dimension to unearmarked funding, allowing agencies to use the humanitarian and development funding interchangeably for implementing the same project activities. When it comes to supporting education or health systems or providing cash assistance for the purpose of social protection or emergency relief, it really doesn’t matter what the funding source is. Aid groups need flexibility.

If the response to the crisis in eastern Chad were to be limited to humanitarian aid, we will see refugees languish in camps for decades to come. Crises are proliferating and becoming more complex, while the resources available to deal with them are dwindling. In Chad and beyond, we need to take a long-term and integrated perspective from the outset that combines humanitarian, development, and peace interventions in an overall crisis response. This requires reimaging the problem from how we perceived it once before to how it presents itself today.

“Nexus” or not, the fact remains: The international aid system needs a radical overhaul to become flexible, simplified, and seamless. There is no more time to waste.

The author was part of the humanitarian operation in Chad from 2023 until early this year. This article was written in a personal capacity.

Damian Lilly, Independent consultant who worked with the UN and NGOs for more than 20 years and writes on a range of humanitarian topics, including the nexus