Humanitarian Aid Dependency and Its Impact on CGSL Participation and Self-Help Culture in South Sudan

This article examines how humanitarian aid dependency shapes participation in Community Group Saving and Lending (CGSL) mechanisms and the development of a self-help culture among rural households in South Sudan. It uses evidence from a doctoral mixed-methods study conducted in Eastern Equatoria, Jonglei and Lakes States between 2022 and 2025. The survey component targeted 85 respondents and generated 81 valid responses, while the qualitative component included 17 interviews. The article argues that humanitarian assistance has a double effect. It can crowd out savings discipline when it becomes a repeated expectation of external rescue, but it can also crowd in self-help when NGOs use assistance to build group rules, financial literacy, governance and member-managed savings systems. Descriptive results show strong support for government-donor collaboration (mean = 4.41), small regular savings (mean = 4.32), member-managed groups (mean = 4.64), savings mobilisation (mean = 4.28), and the poverty-reducing role of savings (mean = 4.51). At the same time, NGO promotion of informal savings recorded a more moderate mean of 3.68, suggesting that external facilitation is important but uneven. Inferential findings showed significant associations between CGSL participation and productivity-related indicators (chi-square = 15.92, p = 0.0001). Logistic regression showed that access to CGSL credit significantly influenced investment in modern agricultural technologies (beta = 1.9459, p = 0.026, odds ratio about 7.00). The article concludes that the problem is not humanitarian assistance itself, but assistance that fails to leave behind stronger local institutions. Policy should therefore redesign aid so that each relief cycle strengthens savings discipline, member ownership, group governance, agricultural credit readiness and formal-informal financial linkages.