By: Basel Hasso
Co-authors: Sawsan Alawnah | May Alchaarani

An IT solution can look perfect on paper. Clear scope, steps, and deliverables.

Then it enters a real context.

For Simula, pro bono projects are part of how we practice our social responsibility. Over time, these projects have also shown us how much context we miss when we look from the outside. They create a different kind of relationship, one built less around scope and delivery, and more around listening and learning together.

This is why we are always in search of context.

We want to understand how people work in fragile or conflict-affected places. We want to see where technology can fit into this reality without becoming one more burden.

This became very clear in Sudan. In 2025 and 2026, much of our work and our learning came from three organizations there.

One of these organizations is a Sudanese nonprofit founded in 2003. It works across more than 11 cities and territories, focusing on peacebuilding, humanitarian aid, refugee support, women’s empowerment, and agricultural education.

Our work with them started with an ERP system implementation. On paper, the project was straightforward: implement the system, host it, and support the team.

But Sudan does not allow a project to stay only on paper.

The organization was working in the middle of an armed conflict where displacement was continuous. Some areas were simply difficult to reach. Teams were under pressure. Access to the system depended on things outside anyone’s control: a training session would be planned, and the power would go out. A meeting would be confirmed, and the internet would disappear. Someone would join a call from a new place, because staying in the old one was no longer possible.

The challenge was not only technical. The challenge was adaptation.

How do you help a team benefit from an ERP system when their environment keeps changing? How do you build confidence in a system when people are already dealing with urgent humanitarian and community needs?

We had to slow down. We had to listen carefully. 

That project taught us that time behaves differently in Sudan. Processes take longer, communication needs more patience, and decisions are shaped by uncertainty.

And then we had to change the way we worked.

We extended the pilot period because a short window in a test environment is not enough when the electricity and internet connection decide the schedule. The team needed more time to try, make mistakes, and build confidence before anything became official. 

When training is interrupted and a long time passes in between sessions, knowledge quietly leaks away. So we opened each session with focused recaps to cover what may have been lost during the gaps. We also gave the team assignments to complete inside the system themselves after sessions, so the learning would not depend only on training sessions.

We made one more change: we brought different teams into shared training sessions because the system we delivered works as one connected whole, and each team needed to see how their work continues in another team’s hands.

None of this was in the original plan. All of it came from listening.

The other two organizations we partnered with in Sudan work in the media sector, and their work is connected to public voice and visibility.

The story started simply. We met someone at a conference. Later, she referred these organizations to us. It did not feel like a formal business opportunity. It felt more like she was saying, “I know people doing important work. Can you help them?”

In a stable context, we usually think of users in terms of roles, tasks, and permissions. The editing process, publishing flow, and approvals matrix.

But in Sudan, the user’s perspective carries another layer.

In an ordinary scenario, we can explore new ideas, platforms, and examples every day. We can quickly compare, imagine, and say: this could work for us. But for many teams in Sudan, the situation is different. The issue is not lack of interest or lack of ability. It is years of interrupted access and limited exposure.

When we were discussing the layout of the media organizations’ websites, the question was not: which design looks better? The question was: which layout would help visitors move through the content with less effort?

So this was not a normal benchmarking exercise.

It became a small research process, done with the project stakeholders. We had to explore examples together, and discuss how different layouts shape content visibility and what would actually make sense in their context.

This reminded us that user perspective in fragile contexts is an ethical requirement. If we do not understand the conditions surrounding the stakeholders, we may build something that looks useful from the outside, but becomes irrelevant in practice.

When we look back at these projects, they remind us of something simple: technology does not start with tools. It starts with context.

And we should say this clearly: whatever patience we learned, we learned from them. The teams kept showing up. Electricity cuts, internet interruptions, long silences; none of it stopped them. Our flexibility was small next to theirs.