We work where the need is sharpest and the potential is highest.

South Sudan became the world’s newest nation in 2011, carrying the hopes of a people who had fought for generations for the right to govern themselves. Two years later, civil conflict tore through the young state. The 2018 revitalized peace agreement quieted the guns but not the consequences: institutions still forming, an economy still fragile, and millions still displaced from the homes and farms they once fed themselves from.

Then the water came. Five consecutive years of historic flooding have submerged farmland across the country, drowning harvests, livestock, and roads, and pushing families onto shrinking islands of dry ground. And since April 2023, war in neighbouring Sudan has driven hundreds of thousands of refugees and returnees across the border into communities that were already stretched past their limits.

The arithmetic of all this is stark. Roughly three in four South Sudanese need humanitarian assistance. Recent food security analyses place over seven million people, more than half the population, in acute food insecurity. Malnutrition stalks well over a million children under five. Maternal mortality remains among the highest on earth, and a girl is more likely to die giving birth than to complete secondary school.

Yet the deepest truth about South Sudan is not its crisis. It is its capacity. The land along the Nile and its tributaries is among the most fertile in Africa. The population is one of the youngest in the world. What is missing is not potential but infrastructure: storage that keeps a harvest alive, markets that pay a fair price, schools that stay open, and institutions that belong to the people they serve. That is the gap ALDO exists to close, and it is a gap your support closes with us.