Food deliveries, cash assistance, cholera response, market recoveries, vocational skills trainings. You name the support activity, humanitarian organization Mercy Corps is likely to be involved in it. Country Director Deeplmala Mahla tells us all about it.

“We basically try to improve their lives and livelihoods, as individuals, as families and as communities”, says Ms. Mahla in a brave effort to summarize the dizzying array of activities that her Mercy Corps outfit is involved in.

Deeplmala Mahla, clearly a woman with ideas and an abundance of energy, believes the time has come to move from relief to recovery, to make aid-dependent communities resilient and self-reliant, to make people able “to stand on their own feet”. One of the best ways of accomplishing this, she believes, is to help communities revive dysfunctional or even defunct local markets.

“Any community - small, medium or big - depends on a functional market. How to make that happen? In very simple terms, people need to be able to have money to buy, they should be willing to buy and the market should have what people want to buy”, says Ms. Mala.

Easier said than done? Not if you are to believe Deeplmala. By supporting both the demand and the supply side of local economies, Mercy Corps has successfully revived many a market.

“We do that by offering cash assistance to enable people to purchase, by training people on a saving scheme, but also by supporting traders with some cash and training, so that they can travel to a nearby town and re-stock the items they need to have available”, she says.

Working with youths is something that Deeplmala is particularly fond of, as they are not only “the future of our country” but also “the present” – and a great source of optimism.

“Some 51 per cent of all South Sudanese are under the age of 18. That youth means that there is a lot of energy out there as young people look at the future and not at the past. There is a lot of scope for improvement with such a young population.”

And the possibilities are right here, says Ms. Mahla.

“Look at this soil. The Nile passes through here, it’s fertile. We can grow coffee, gum, hibiscus tea, sorghum, beans. We can make honey. There is immense potential. We should move away from all the negative and difficult stories and look at all the positives, so that communities can be transformed.”

Yet another way of achieving such transformations, when not being busy with cholera response activities and current emergency measures to ensure food security, is to focus on education. And guess what? Mercy Corps does that, too.

“We build schools, train teachers and engage with the families of the students, especially the girls. It’s important to retain them at school so that they don’t just drop out after a while”, she says.

Providing skills, more generally, is one of Mercy Corps’ bigger bets to build self-sufficient communities, and preferably the skills most sought after by the people themselves, be they blacksmithing, computer literacy or anything in between.

Well, almost anything, anyway. Mercy Corps does take a pragmatic approach to training. As Deeplmala Mahla puts it:

“It is all well and good asking people what skills they would find most useful, but that’s just the first step. You also have to make sure that these skills are actually needed in the market.”