A Review of the Emergency Response in Maban, South Sudan 2012

As part of MSF's on-going analysis of emergency response capacity within the humanitarian aid system, we undertook a case study review of the Maban county emergency in South Sudan which peaked over the summer of 2012.

This was, in many ways, a ‘classic’ emergency – a large number of refugees fleeing conflict, crossing an international border into a sparsely populated and isolated rural area, requiring the full spectrum of humanitarian assistance and almost entirely dependent on it. Although the emergency should not have come as a surprise, and in a part of the world that has a long-term presence of humanitarian and development actors, it still caught many humanitarian agencies unprepared to mount a large scale, logistics- and human resource-heavy operation.