How Nagi Musa and the Takamol project are rebuilding the muscle of Sudan’s civil society
In the early 2000s, a Sudanese teenager sat in internet cafés in Amman and Cairo, scrolling through history, forums, and fragments of revolutions unfolding far away. He was not looking for news. He was looking for himself.
“I was always moving,” Nagi Musa recalls. “Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia. Everywhere, I was the one who didn’t quite belong. And that makes you ask very early: who am I, and where is my place in the world?”
He went looking for answers in the only place available to a restless teenager at the time: online forums, early social networks, the scattered digital traces of a country that was already fragmenting. He read history, argued with strangers, followed news of student movements. That search led him back to Sudan. First online, then physically.
When he returned to Khartoum for high school, he felt, for the first time, what it meant not to be singled out. “I walked in the streets and no one pointed at my colour. No one made jokes. For the first time, identity was not a problem.”
But another, deeper shock awaited him. He discovered that the same society that had finally embraced him was structured by layers of exclusion. “I realised I had privileges others didn’t, simply because of where my family came from. The same logic of discrimination I had experienced abroad was operating inside my own country.”
That contradiction became the axis of his life.
Long before he worked in international programmes or c0-founded Takamol, Nagi was driven by a simple, stubborn conviction: knowledge and power do not live in institutions; they live in people.
“Why do we always bring communities to hotels for workshops?” he asks. “Why don’t we bring the conversation to the markets, to the villages, to where life actually happens? In social change, the expert is often the person who has lived the problem, not the one with the best English.”
This philosophy shaped everything that followed. As a student, as a grassroots organiser, and later as a capacity development specialist, Nagi rejected the idea that civil society must look like its donors. “Civil society is not a registered NGO,” he says. “Civil society is you and a group of people deciding to work for the public good. You don’t need a logo. You don’t need a donor. You need agency.”
When Sudan’s 2019 revolution opened new space for civic action, Nagi became part of a generation tasked with strengthening organisations that had long survived under repression. Working with international partners, he helped design approaches to organisational development, governance, and security that were grounded in local realities and peer learning rather than imported templates. The aim was not to professionalise for its own sake, but to build resilience.
Then came the war.
Cities emptied. Activists scattered across borders. Organisations split into fragments, some operating under different armed authorities, others in exile, all under enormous strain. And just as civil society was struggling to reconfigure itself for survival, a second rupture followed: the sudden withdrawal of major international funding.
“It felt like the ground disappeared twice,” Nagi says. “First, you lose your home. Then you lose the systems that were helping you keep going. Many organisations couldn’t pay rent, couldn’t keep staff, couldn’t even legally exist in the countries hosting them. But beyond the practical side, there was something deeper: a feeling of being completely alone.”
What was at risk, he realised, was not only projects, but memory.
“Each activist, each organisation carries networks of trust,” he explains. “They connect villages to cities, youth to elders, east to west. This is social capital built over years. If it collapses, even if peace comes tomorrow, who will monitor, who will document, who will hold anyone accountable?”
This is where Takamol, Arabic for “integration”, was born. Together with co-founders Samah Omer and Khalid Elshiekha and small team of Sudanese colleagues now based in the region, Nagi set out to protect what war and abandonment threatened to erase: the connective tissue of Sudan’s civic space.
Takamol does not begin with trainings. It begins with relationships. Mentorship instead of one-off workshops, peer learning instead of top-down instruction. Hybrid forums that allow organisations operating in different parts of Sudan, and in exile, to see each other again, speak again, and slowly rebuild trust in a deeply polarised landscape.
“We are not here to lecture,” Nagi says. “We are here to recognise that knowledge already exists and help structure it, share it, and protect it.”
The programme addresses practical survival – security, governance, organisational systems – but also the war’s most corrosive by-product: hate speech and disinformation. “Hate speech works because it plays on fear and emotion,” he notes. “So you cannot counter it with technical language. You need conflict-sensitive storytelling, credibility, and ethical grounding.”
When most international funding collapsed, the EED stepped in with start-up support for Takamol, enabling the initiative to take form at a moment when few others could. For Nagi, the significance went beyond budgets.
“EED support is not only about activities,” he says. “It is about mental resilience. When everything is falling apart, the fact that someone believes your work still matters keeps you from sinking into despair. It tells you: your knowledge, your networks, your people are not invisible.”
Today, Takamol works with Sudanese organisations across frontlines and borders, nurturing what Nagi calls “the nervous system of civil society” – the channels through which information, solidarity, and collective memory flow.
He knows that this work may not deliver quick victories. “Being an activist means believing that tomorrow is better than silence,” he says. “Even if you don’t see the result, you keep the values alive.”
One day, Nagi hopes, Sudan will enter a post-war moment. Generals will negotiate. Agreements will be signed. And when that happens, the country will need more than political deals. It will need the quiet infrastructure of trust, knowledge, and civic courage to make peace real.
“If you leave the future only to generals,” he says, “you will only produce more generals. Peace does not come from those who carry guns alone. It comes from civilians who know their communities, who can monitor, remember, and hold power to account."
Takamol, in this sense, is about rebuilding the muscle of civil society – its networks, its coordination, its confidence – so that when the strongmen speak, they are no longer the only ones who matter
This article reflects the views of the grantees featured and does not necessarily represent the official opinion of the EED.
