Morris Madut Kon, Managing Partner at Afrontier Consulting Ltd and Lecturer at the University of Juba 

In 2013, just a few years after South Sudan became the world’s newest country after gaining independence from Sudan, civil war erupted. The South Sudanese Civil War lasted from 2013 until early 2020. It displaced 4.5 million people and killed more than 400,000. 

Morris Madut Kon worked as a reporter in South Sudan in 2015 and 2016, at the height of the civil war. “The air was filled with a veil of mistrust and chaos,” Kon says, a literal fog of war that proved to be a formative moment.  

Investigating the roots of mistrust have been at the crux of his work ever since. “In the case of South Sudan, I think the trust has deteriorated,” Kon says. He later moved to Japan to earn a masters’ degree at Ritsumeikan University in Japan. The young researcher believes that a perceived lack of change, even after the war ended “has really drained people’s trust.” 

After finishing his degree in 2019, Kon returned home to South Sudan to become a full-time lecturer at the University of Juba. There, he identified another issue. “I realised there is a serious challenge with data here in South Sudan,” says Kon. Local communities, especially rural villages, Kon says, can feel ignored by non-governmental organisations or government agencies. “They want to implement what they think is good for them, and not really what may be necessarily good for the communities,” Kon says. “Communities have their own priorities.” 

Kon worries the quality of the data that these organisations are operating on is often lacking or provided by external consultants who may not understand the context. “In South Sudan, in particular, there are so many organisations trying to provide material services to the community, but most of them do not have adequate data.”   

In response, he recently started the consultancy firm Afrontier Consulting. Kon hopes that through his work collecting accurate data for organisations and more broadly, through civic engagement among youth, that young people will be able to translate their mistrust into positive change. “In South Sudan,” Kon says, “I think a lot of people are willing to hold leaders to account.”