Visibility Support for UNMAS–IOM in South Kordofan

In early 2025 Veynuus deployed a field team to South Kordofan, Sudan, to provide visibility support for the partnership between the United Nations Mine Action Service and the International Organization for Migration. The assignment was to document operations in a conflict-affected area, including explosive ordnance risk education sessions, and to produce the resulting material in both Arabic and English. The work combined trauma-informed storytelling with professional photo and video documentation.

Explosive ordnance contamination is a slow emergency. It does not resolve when fighting pauses, and it restricts the ordinary movements displaced communities depend on: reaching water, farming a field, returning to a house. Risk education is one response to that, and it is difficult material to communicate about, because the audience for the content is not the audience for the sessions. Donors and international readers need to understand what is being done. The communities in the frame need not to be exposed by the act of documenting them.

The operating conditions set the outer limits of what was possible. Access to field locations was restricted, movement windows were narrow, and the timeline was tight. In practice that means a shooting plan built to survive losing a location on the morning it was scheduled, with material complete enough after each movement that a cancelled day leaves no hole in the final package.

There were two clients with related but distinct communication priorities. Mine action work is technical and mandate-specific; migration and displacement work is about people, movement and durable outcomes. The same footage has to serve both without being pulled thin. Coordinating between agencies with different emphases, while documenting diverse communities in a way that stayed culturally appropriate, added planning that could not be improvised in the field.

Veynuus deployed embedded field teams trained in trauma-informed storytelling. In practice, that phrase describes a set of concrete restraints rather than a sensibility. An interview does not push a person back into the worst moment of their experience to obtain a usable clip. It stops when the person wants it to stop, including after they have already agreed to it. It does not imply that telling the story will produce assistance, because that trade is not ours to offer and the suggestion of it corrupts the consent underneath the whole exercise.

Consent was taken in the participant's own language, with an explanation of where the material would appear. Identifiability was treated as a decision rather than a default: whether a face is shown, whether a name is used, whether a location is specified. In a conflict-affected area those choices can carry consequences for the person in the frame long after the content has stopped circulating, and they were made with the agency staff who knew the local context.

Documentation of risk education sessions was handled with a gender- and age-sensitive focus. Sessions frequently involve children, so a camera changes the room in ways that matter both ethically and practically: a session that becomes a performance for a lens has stopped teaching anyone anything. Framing was agreed with facilitators before equipment entered the room.

Bilingual production was treated as parallel authoring rather than translation after the fact. Material produced in English and then rendered into Arabic tends to carry English structure and English emphasis, which reads as foreign to the audience it is supposedly for. Producing in both languages from the source material kept the Arabic accurate to what people actually said, and kept the English readable for the international audiences the agencies report to. Throughout, the team stayed in close coordination with the UNMAS and IOM communications leads, adapting to changing field conditions while holding to the same standards of ethical and sensitive reporting.

Delivery was a field deployment into a conflict zone, with all that implies for how the days were structured. Movements were planned around access windows and security guidance rather than around what would have made the best sequence. Full field coverage was achieved across the assignment, which in this context meant that every activity the agencies needed documented was documented, not that every location was reached on the day originally intended.

The team produced across three content formats, covering field activities through professional photo and video storytelling and documenting the risk education sessions specifically. Material was reviewed as it was gathered rather than at the end, so that a gap could still be filled while the team was in place.

Output was then produced in Arabic and English and handed over in a form both agencies could use directly, organised so that a communications officer could find what they needed without going back to the field team.

The assignment supported two UN agencies, produced content in two languages across three formats, and achieved full coverage of the field activities in a single conflict-zone deployment. The agencies received polished content that amplifies partner impact while honouring the resilience of the communities documented, and the risk education sessions were recorded with the gender- and age-sensitive focus the material required.

The bilingual output ensured reach across both Arabic- and English-speaking audiences, which for a partnership operating in Sudan is not a presentational nicety. Content that exists only in English communicates about a community rather than with it, and in mine action the people most at risk from contamination are themselves part of the audience.

Sensitive humanitarian communications is a discipline in which the binding constraints are ethical before they are technical. Almost anyone can produce a moving image from a displacement setting; the difficulty lies in producing one that the person in it would recognise as fair, that does not expose them, and that still does the job the agency commissioned. The standards this assignment ran on are the ones we apply whenever the subject of the content has far less power than the organisations distributing it.

• Photo & video storytelling
• Bilingual content production
• EORE session documentation
• Humanitarian visibility support