When Sudan’s warring generals agreed to a 72-hour cease-fire in late April, Enas Elewad finally had the chance to step out of her house after more than a week to replenish food supplies for her family. But that proved to be a challenge — Sudan’s e-banking system had been dysfunctional since the war started, and Elewad could not access her own money in her bank account. “We had almost already run out of everything,” the 34-year-old dentist from the capital Khartoum told Rest of World. “There was no cash to buy electricity, food, and even to pay for the ridiculous cost of transportation if we decided to evacuate.”
Fortunately for Elewad, she had read about Cashi, a local fintech startup, on Facebook. She urged her friends in calmer parts of the country to send her money via the platform, and then went to a nearby Cashi kiosk to withdraw it.
Amid Sudan’s ongoing crisis, Cashi has launched a peer-to-peer transaction system that bypasses Sudan’s central e-banking system. Founded in 2020, the app allows users to transfer money using voucher numbers that can be purchased and exchanged for cash at kiosks. “We were stuck until we managed to get some cash from Cashi to recharge our mobile phones with enough credit to reconnect with our relatives,” Elewad said. She also used Cashi to transfer some money to her uncle’s family on the other side of Khartoum to coordinate an evacuation process. In May, she and her family moved to Cairo.
Cashi and other Sudanese tech startups, including DataQ, Tirhal, and KhartouMap, have adapted their services to assist people during the ongoing civil war in the country. The power tussle between the Sudanese military and the well-funded militia group Rapid Support Forces has devastated crucial infrastructure, disrupting health care, telecommunications, logistics, and banking. Online services for the Bank of Khartoum, which controls the majority of the digital banking market in the country, are not functioning properly.
“Our main objective right now is not profit or growth but to find and leverage every way to enable services that will help Sudanese get access to funds so that they can use it to live or evacuate to safety,” Cashi CEO Tarneem Saeed told Rest of World. “With everything else down at the moment, our local rail is filling the gap to help the people. We’ve also been hard at work to open up global banking rails to ensure seamless international inflow from diaspora communities and organizations.”
Before the war started, Sudan had a fledgling tech startup ecosystem that had just begun attracting global investors. Cashi’s parent company, Alsoug, raised $5 million in 2021 and another $1 million in 2022 from investors, including Fawry, an Egyptian fintech firm, OneDayYes, which focuses on African female founders, and EQ2 Ventures, a Middle Eastern firm. Another fintech startup called Bloom raised $6.5 million in 2022 from global investors, including Y Combinator and football stars Blaise Matuidi and Kieran Gibbs. These were landmark developments for Sudan’s tech startup industry, which had until then mainly survived on local support. The war brought this growth to a screeching halt, but Sudanese entrepreneurs are showing exceptional resilience amid tough times, Ahmed Elmurtada, managing partner at Khartoum-based venture firm 294startups, told Rest of World. “One thing is certain and has been proven over the years: Sudanese entrepreneurs are resilient, and their businesses are built to out-survive crises,” he said.
Just three days after the war started, Sudanese market intelligence firm DataQ launched a platform called Nidaa (meaning “call for help” in Arabic). It allows people in distress to post their requirements — from money and groceries to medical services and a ride to safety — so volunteers can reach out to them.
Nidaa helped Noha Abdalla, a 35-year-old software engineer, evacuate with her family of nine to Egypt, and then to the U.S. “I was introduced to Nidaa by a nonprofit organization I was volunteering for,” she told Rest of World from Virginia, where she currently lives. “I listed my request [on Nidaa] and was able to get all the help and resources we needed during that difficult time, including medical attention to my ailing parent.”
When Wafa Ahmed was unable to access the internet from her home in Khartoum, her friend in Canada requested transportation for her on Nidaa. A relief organization contacted Ahmed over the phone and helped her move to Egypt with her family of five, she told Rest of World. “The organization helped us connect with the nearest bus station to Egypt, helped us with bus booking, and provided us with a car that came to bring us to the station,” Ahmed said.
Nidaa has received close to 8,000 requests, and over 12 local organizations and 600 registered accounts provide aid through the platform, according to DataQ’s founder and CEO, Samer Mohamed, who has also left Sudan. He told Rest of World Nidaa has over 50 volunteers worldwide.
Among the biggest challenges facing Sudanese people since the war began is affordable transportation to safer locations. “If you want to get a bus to leave from Khartoum to the north of Sudan, or some of the other cities, for example, people are paying the equivalent of $2,000 per ticket,” said Mohamed Karar, investment partner at VC firm Launch Africa, who had helped his relatives evacuate from Khartoum. “Now imagine how much a family of five or six — which is quite normal in Sudan — will pay just to get to the border.”
Sudanese mobility startup Tirhal has stepped up to provide relief by forfeiting its commission for people moving out of war zones. Professional drivers in Khartoum can currently use Tirhal’s app for free. Co-founder and CEO Mohamed Elzakey believes this will encourage more people to list their vehicles on the platform, eventually bringing down the cost of rides.
“We are focusing on moving more people to safety,” Elzakey told Rest of World. “While our commission stays in the other cities with less or no tension, we have taken it off in the capital, and now let riders and drivers negotiate deals. We have also launched a cross-country feature where people can book a ride from Khartoum to Ethiopia.”
Sudan Safe Passages, a volunteer group of local and diaspora Sudanese, has built an app called Amen, said Hiba Sharief, a Silicon Valley veteran and senior technology executive at Amazon Web Services. Amen uses crowdsourced data to send real-time updates on secure transport routes and hospital availability.
“Some of the tech-driven solutions being built today are made specifically for the war while others are simply accelerating much-needed solutions the market has always demanded that were not yet deployed,” Sharief told Rest of World. “What I am most impressed by is that the Sudanese people are all working tirelessly to make life less difficult during this time. That, to me, is impact.”
