Every morning in Sudan begins with uncertainty. 

For Tagwa Abdelati, a senior social and behavior change advisor with the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs (CCP), plans can change overnight. Roads close, electricity disappears, and communities are displaced again. Just when life begins to feel manageable, everything shifts. 

“You start to adjust to one thing,” she said. “Then you wake up and find it isn’t working anymore. Every day, we’re trying to re-adjust.” 

It would be easy to tell a story only about what war has taken away. 

But that wasn’t the story Tagwa wanted to tell during the 2026 International Social and Behavior Change Communication (SBCC) Summit, held last month in Panama.  

Instead, spoke about what she and her colleagues are learning as they listen to communities across Sudan, through CCP’s involvement in the WISH2 project, funded by the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office and led by the International Planned Parenthood Foundation. 

Since conflict erupted in April 2023, Sudan has become what the United Nations has called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. More than 30 million people need assistance. Millions have been displaced. Women and girls face increasing barriers to sexual and reproductive health services and heightened risks of gender-based violence. 

Those realities are impossible to ignore. 

But Tagwa challenged Summit participants to look beyond what conflict destroys and ask a different question: 

“What happens to social norms, relationships, and behaviors when everyday life is turned upside down?” 

To find out, the WISH2 team didn’t begin by designing an intervention. 

They started by listening. 

Using a human-centered design approach, the team brought together women and men, young people, people with disabilities, internally displaced people and host communities, community leaders, health workers and government partners from three regions of Sudan. They wanted to understand not only what communities had lost, but how people were responding to a rapidly changing reality. 

What emerged wasn’t simply a list of needs. It was evidence that social norms were already shifting. 

As economic pressures reshape family life, husbands are becoming more involved in reproductive health decisions and accompanying their wives to health services. Families are having more open conversations about birth spacing. In some households, women must travel to work while men stay home to care for children and manage daily responsibilities, a complete reversal of longstanding custom. 

For SBCC practitioners, those changes matter. 

Social norms influence how families make decisions, seek health care, share power and support one another. When those norms begin to shift, even during conflict, they create opportunities to strengthen healthy behaviors and build on changes that communities are already making themselves. 

The work also revealed what remains difficult to talk about. 

Although gender-based violence and conflict related sexual violence have increased dramatically during the conflict, it did not surface openly during the earliest conversations Tagwa had with communities. Only later, when social service workers and providers joined the process did those experiences begin to emerge. 

For Tagwa, that reinforced one of the project’s most important lessons, that listening takes time. 

Like many of her colleagues, Tagwa has lived through the same uncertainty as the communities she serves. She recently returned home to Khartoum, after three years seeking shelter in safer parts of Sudan, navigating the same disruptions, displacement and instability that have reshaped daily life across the country.  

Her trip to Panama almost didn’t happen. She left days early to ensure she was able to get out, taking four flights to make her way to Panama City. 

“I consider myself one of the lucky people,” she said. “But I’m lucky, and I’m also suffering.” 

Even so, she has witnessed remarkable acts of care. 

Young people have organized neighborhood kitchens to help feed displaced families and those who remained inside the war zones, initiatives primarily paid for with contributions from people in safer parts of Sudan and outside the country. Communities have pooled resources to buy medicine. Neighbors have stepped in to support one another when formal systems could not. 

For Tagwa, those moments offer another reminder that crisis does not only reshape infrastructure. It reshapes relationships. 

And for SBCC practitioners, recognizing those shifts is just as important as recognizing communities’ needs. 

“Even in the hardest times,” Tagwa told those assembled, “change is already happening. Our role is to listen, support, help and direct to shape that change in ways that build dignity, trust and hope.”