projects

Sudan

Albany's work in Sudan covers a broad range of communications activity:

  • Strategic Communications
  • Public Information
  • Community Outreach
  • Advocacy
  • Media development
  • Training

Our team of communications professionals have been working and promoting peace and development in Sudan since 2006, and continue to do so today for a variety of clients, including the UN, the European and African Unions and the UK and US governments.

US State Department project

In 2010-2011, Albany ran a US State Department-funded community outreach programme in Darfur supporting the Doha peace negotiations. Focusing on the Arab and nomadic sections of society - communities that hitherto had been under-represented in the peace process - this project solicited and gathered information from the rural populations about a post-conflict Darfur. The material obtained was then processed, edited and fed back to the State Department and other key stakeholders.

African Mission in Sudan / United Nations Mission in Darfur

In 2006, while working under a UK government Department for International Development contract for the African Mission in Sudan (AMIS, rehatted to UNAMID in January 2007), Albany was charged with ensuring the widest possible knowledge and understanding of the Darfur Peace Agreement, across the general population of Darfur and other key stakeholders.

Under this remit, Albany employed a number of traditional and culturally-specific public outreach strategies that included direct engagement with tribal and local community leaders as cultural conduits. We launched, produced and staged:

  • Darfur arts and music cultural festival, called Afia Darfur
  • Newspapers;
  • Radio programmes (in local unwritten languages);
  • Street theatre;
  • Concerts;
  • Sporting events.

Perhaps most notable is Afia Darfur, the arts and music cultural festival in Darfur, developed to promote a culture of peace and reconciliation. A definite highlight within it was the Darfur Horse Festival, which attracted thousands from across the region to a lively celebration of horse-racing, providing an informal forum in which senior tribal leaders were able to air their differences and work on reconciliation.

These efforts led to the establishment of a Sudanese NGO, Afia Sudan, staffed and run by Sudanese. Through advocacy programmes, Afia Sudan continues to win and implement contracts for various UN agencies today in areas such as community sensitization and Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration programmes.

Albany continues to conceive and develop projects in the whole of Sudan, building on its professional staff's intricate knowledge of Sudan, its peoples and cultures, and the institutional memory that has been steadily reinforced since 2006.