ImpACT International | Local aid workers bear brunt of South Sudan’s escalating violence
The deaths of 36 humanitarian workers in South Sudan in 2026 are more than a grim measure of insecurity. They expose a deepening national emergency in which those delivering food, health care, protection, shelter and clean water are being killed while attempting to reach people trapped by violence and hunger. The risks are borne disproportionately by South Sudanese nationals—workers who remain in their communities after shifts end and whose employment may sustain entire families.
At the UN Security Council on August 6, UNMISS chief Anita Kiki Gbeho warned that
“This year alone, 36 humanitarian workers have been killed and 391 access incidents recorded”
— Anita Kiki Gbeho. She said both trends showed a significant rise from the same period in 2025. The figures demonstrate that the country’s humanitarian emergency is growing at exactly the moment when people need aid workers the most.
South Sudan’s need for humanitarian assistance is vast. More than 10 million people—about two-thirds of the country’s population—are projected to require assistance in 2026. Nearly eight million people are facing crisis-level hunger, famine risks have been identified in four counties, and a cholera outbreak has killed more than 1,700 people. When aid workers cannot move safely, these are not abstract figures: children miss treatment, displaced families miss food distributions, and communities lose access to vaccination, nutrition and emergency health services.
The security of aid workers must therefore be regarded as a central measure of the country’s broader stability. If workers cannot safely take medicine to a clinic, transport food to an isolated community, or travel to monitor emergency operations, humanitarian assistance becomes unreliable. The result is that civilians already facing the consequences of conflict suffer again from delayed or denied support.
Local workers face unequal exposure
The term humanitarian worker suggests a uniform group, but the reality is unequal. South Sudanese staff make up the large majority of the aid workforce and carry its most persistent risk. They are more likely to travel locally, work in high-risk areas, use exposed transport routes and live in the places where armed violence, criminality and intercommunal disputes play out. They cannot always relocate to guarded compounds or leave the country when threats increase.
Between 2011 and 2023, 94 percent of aid workers killed in South Sudan were South Sudanese nationals. This is a defining fact of the crisis. It means attacks on humanitarian staff are not mainly an international-worker safety issue; they are a national protection failure with consequences for South Sudanese families, communities and civil society.
South Sudan has consistently ranked among the world’s most dangerous places for humanitarians. It has recorded more aid workers killed, wounded or kidnapped over the past decade than any other country. In 2024 alone, 34 aid workers died in South Sudan, many in targeted revenge attacks and ambushes in insecure areas including Jonglei. The 2026 death toll therefore reflects an entrenched trajectory of violence rather than a one-off deterioration.
One local humanitarian worker captured the inequality in stark terms:
“When I go home at the end of the day, everyone knows who I am, and who I work for… I don’t get to take off my vest. I don’t get to go back to a guarded compound, like the internationals”
— South Sudanese aid worker. The comment illustrates the daily vulnerability of national staff, whose identity, workplace and movements are often known to people around them.
This is a Human Rights issue as much as a staff-safety issue. A worker’s nationality should not determine whether they have a realistic chance of surviving the job. Local workers should not be expected to bear risks that international employees would consider unacceptable, particularly when they often have fewer resources, less access to protective infrastructure and fewer options for emergency evacuation.
Access restrictions turn violence into hunger
Attacks are only one part of the danger. Aid operations are also constrained by roadblocks, bureaucratic demands, illegal fees, threats, looting, restrictions on flights and insecurity along supply routes. The 391 humanitarian-access incidents recorded between January and June 2026 represented a sharp increase from the same period in 2025. In practical terms, each incident can stop a convoy, postpone medical deliveries or force an organisation to reduce its presence in an area where need is greatest.
The access problem is especially pronounced in Upper Nile, Jonglei and Central Equatoria. These regions have repeatedly recorded high numbers of incidents affecting humanitarian actors. Such incidents may appear administrative or logistical, but their consequences are immediate and human. They determine whether isolated communities receive food before flooding, whether a remote clinic has medicines, and whether a child suffering from cholera can reach care.
In February, the UN reported attacks on health-care facilities in Jonglei alongside attacks on a World Food Programme convoy, an airstrike on a Médecins Sans Frontières-supported hospital, and the burning of a Save the Children field office and destruction of its health centre. The UN Secretary-General warned that
“crippling humanitarian operations and shutting down essential services”
were placing civilians and aid workers at serious risk — António Guterres.
The impact becomes even more serious when humanitarian access appears to follow conflict lines. Médecins Sans Frontières has reported that restrictions imposed in opposition-held areas of Jonglei, including Lankien, Pieri and Akobo, have suspended humanitarian flights and made it difficult or impossible to deliver essential staff and medical supplies. Any State Policy that restricts neutral relief according to territorial or political control risks turning humanitarian assistance into a weapon of war.
The protection of aid workers and the right of communities to receive assistance are inseparable. Restricting access does not simply inconvenience organisations; it deprives civilians of the means to survive. In a country facing hunger, disease, displacement and recurrent flooding, denial of humanitarian access can become as destructive as direct violence.
The convoy ambush showed the cost
The June 30 attack in Duk County, Jonglei, underlined the lethal nature of the threat. Five humanitarian workers were killed when a clearly marked convoy operated by the John Dau Foundation was ambushed while staff returned from an Action Against Hunger training exercise. Four more people were injured, while civilians were also reportedly killed or wounded.
At that stage, the ambush brought the confirmed number of humanitarian workers and contractors killed in 2026 to 29. Within weeks, the UN’s year-to-date figure had reached 36. Such a rapid rise should dispel any suggestion that workers face merely incidental danger in a conflict environment. Clearly marked convoys, health facilities and humanitarian premises should not become military targets, criminal opportunities or symbols for political retaliation.
UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said
“Attacks on humanitarian workers are unacceptable and violate international humanitarian law”
— Stéphane Dujarric. That assessment is legally and morally correct. Yet South Sudan’s repeated crises show the gap between strong public language and practical accountability.
Protection requires prompt and credible investigations, the identification of perpetrators, safe channels for survivors and witnesses to provide testimony, and prosecutions where evidence supports them. Without these measures, every public condemnation risks becoming another statement that armed actors and criminals learn to ignore.
Impunity keeps the cycle alive
There can be no durable humanitarian protection without consequences for those who kill, threaten or obstruct aid workers. The persistence of attacks despite years of international concern points to a broader climate of impunity. Armed groups, local militias, criminals and individual perpetrators are less likely to be deterred when investigations are opaque, justice is delayed and enforcement is weak.
A joint statement by the embassies of Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Kenya, the Netherlands, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States, alongside the European Union Delegation, followed a series of killings of aid staff and contractors in February. The group said
“These heinous attacks on humanitarian workers are unacceptable”
— Joint statement by international embassies and the EU Delegation.
The incidents included the killing of a staff member connected to UNICEF-supported projects in Baliet County on February 7, the murder of an IMA World Health nurse at his home in Wunbiem, Ayod County, on February 13, and the murder of a World Food Programme contractor in Ngueny, Nasir County, on February 16. Their deaths show that the danger is not limited to aid convoys. Workers may be targeted at home, on the road or at humanitarian facilities.
The diplomatic statement called on the transitional government to prevent the targeting of humanitarian personnel, ensure their safety and hold perpetrators accountable. This demand identifies a basic state responsibility. Even when violence is committed by non-state actors, authorities are responsible for protecting civilians, enforcing law, securing relief routes and making clear that the killing of humanitarian workers will carry consequences.
A serious State Policy response would include public reporting on investigations into attacks on aid personnel, improved law-enforcement deployment on high-risk routes, an end to illegal taxation and interference, and clear restrictions on any official actions that obstruct neutral aid. A policy has little value if it cannot be measured, monitored and enforced.
Localisation must not transfer danger
The aid sector increasingly promotes localisation, which means giving national and community-based organisations a greater role in humanitarian operations. In South Sudan, this approach is necessary. Local organisations have language skills, community relationships and a detailed understanding of local realities that international agencies often lack.
However, localisation becomes exploitative when risk moves to local organisations without equal control over resources, security systems or operational decisions. It cannot mean that international organisations retain authority over funding and strategy while national employees absorb the greatest danger in the field.
Humanitarian researcher Abby Stoddard called this
“the dark side of localisation”
— Abby Stoddard. She added,
“There’s been a transfer of risk without an equitable transfer of risk management”
— Abby Stoddard. This is a crucial point for the humanitarian system in South Sudan.
Equitable localisation would mean security funding for national partners, appropriate insurance and death benefits, trauma care, safe communications systems, flexible operational budgets and real authority to decide whether an activity is safe enough to proceed. It would also require donors to stop treating security expenditure as an unnecessary administrative cost.
In a country where aid workers are being killed in record numbers, protection is part of ethical humanitarian delivery. It is not merely an overhead. Globally, national aid workers face fatality rates more than three times higher than international staff. South Sudan represents an extreme example of what happens when this inequality is combined with political volatility, weak infrastructure, widespread weapons and impunity.
The loss is not limited to individual staff members. It weakens local organisations, deprives families of income, erodes community trust and reduces the country’s capacity to respond to its own crises. When experienced local workers leave the sector because it is too dangerous, the quality and reach of humanitarian operations decline.
Peace, rights and humanitarian protection
The danger to humanitarian staff cannot be separated from South Sudan’s fragile political transition. Violence displaced more than 420,000 people between January and June 2026, primarily in Jonglei, while the country is hosting around 1.4 million people who fled the conflict in neighbouring Sudan. These overlapping emergencies have increased the demand for assistance while making relief delivery more dangerous.
Anita Kiki Gbeho has warned that humanitarian conditions remain extremely concerning, as armed confrontations and communal violence continue to displace civilians and threaten preparations for December 2026 elections. A credible election cannot be separated from Human Rights protections. If civilians cannot safely access food, health care and humanitarian assistance, and if aid workers cannot move without fear of attack, the foundations of peaceful political participation are already weakened.
UN relief chief Tom Fletcher summarised the emergency:
“Conflict up. Hunger up. Displacement up. Attacks on aid workers up”
— Tom Fletcher. He also stressed,
“We need access, funding and respect for international humanitarian law”
— Tom Fletcher.
These are not separate demands. Access allows aid to reach communities. Funding enables agencies to sustain lifesaving services and invest in protection. Respect for international humanitarian law protects the fundamental principle that humanitarian personnel, medical services and civilians must not be targeted.
Protecting local aid workers in South Sudan is ultimately about protecting the people they serve. The 36 workers killed so far in 2026 were not separate from the humanitarian response; they were the response. Their safety must become central to State Policy, accountability efforts and peacebuilding, because a country cannot credibly claim to protect its people while those trying to save lives are left unprotected.