Fogbow, a for-profit US company with a mission to facilitate humanitarian access in some of the world’s most challenging environments, is coordinating food drops in South Sudan that critics say support the government’s counter-insurgency efforts against opposition militias.
The company, which is largely owned and staffed by former American government, military, and intelligence personnel, has also been active in Gaza and Sudan, where some aid workers criticised its interventions for inefficiencies and raised concerns that its operating model could compromise humanitarian principles.
With the traditional aid system under strain from global funding cuts, many observers fear that for-profit companies like Fogbow are stepping in to serve the political aims of belligerent governments rather than to help those most in need.
“These organisations don’t have the same redlines as other organisations as to what is acceptable and what is not acceptable,” said Mark Bowden, an associate fellow at Chatham House, and a retired senior UN official. “You’ve got to put the emergence of these actors in the context of a massively changing industry,” he said.
Incorporated in 2022, Fogbow is owned by a group of private sector consultants and venture capitalists. They aimed to create a logistics firm that would leverage experience gained during US global military campaigns to deliver aid more effectively in hard-to-reach and conflict-affected areas.
Fogbow’s leadership is clear that it is not a humanitarian organisation, but an organisation that aims to support humanitarians. The company’s director of humanitarian operations, Chris Hyslop, said it should not be expected to apply humanitarian principles but is trying to work within their boundaries.
“We want to augment and support humanitarian delivery, not replace it,” said Hyslop, who previously worked for the UN’s emergency aid coordination agency (OCHA). “There’s a niche here that most humanitarian organisations don’t fill.”
To date, Fogbow has transported thousands of metric tonnes of food aid into three of the world’s most acute crises – South Sudan, Sudan, and Gaza – though interviews with more than 40 international and local aid workers, US government sources, local officials, and analysts raised concerns about its practices.
In South Sudan, the company is working with the government to coordinate food drops into government-controlled settlements in opposition territory. Much of that territory has been the focus of recent military operations, including airstrikes and a ground offensive that has displaced tens of thousands of people.
Opposition groups have decried the drops as a tactic to lure displaced civilians back into government-controlled areas, in order to increase support for the state. Civilians, fearful of accepting food from the government – and of returning to places now under its control – say they have largely avoided the aid.
Hyslop said Fogbow conducted due diligence ahead of operations in South Sudan, and that drop sites were selected by the government in collaboration with a local NGO. The government said its aim is to help people who have been displaced by the fighting and to fill gaps left by cuts to humanitarian funding.
Concerns also surround Fogbow’s partnership with BAR Aviation, a Ugandan company that is providing planes and pilots for the airdrop flights, and which is deeply enmeshed with the Ugandan military, according to regional analysts, and Ugandan government documents seen by The New Humanitarian.
BAR Aviation – which has subcontracted Fogbow to coordinate the airdrops – has supported South Sudan’s military with aerial logistics during the recent fighting, according to UN sources, even as the army is alleged to have used incendiary weapons that have killed and badly burned civilians. The government has denied those allegations.
Asked about reports of BAR Aviation’s links to the Ugandan military, Fogbow officials said the company has a good reputation as a safe and secure operator, and is the only supplier of the required aircraft in the region that will fly in conflict-affected areas. Samuel Kiirya, BAR Aviation’s team lead in Juba, said the company has no business with the Ugandan military.
Fogbow has promoted its private-sector efficiency and military expertise. But in Gaza and Sudan, its work delivered limited and at times underwhelming results, according to sources familiar with its operations.
In Sudan, where the national army is fighting the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), Fogbow was contracted last year by an international aid group to conduct airdrops to famine-affected communities. The contract, however, was not renewed due to frustrations over the company’s performance, according to an aid worker with knowledge of the partnership.
In Gaza, the company’s debut, Fogbow moved over 1,000 tonnes of food aid through a US military-constructed floating pier as well as the Israeli port of Ashdod. It described its contribution as “a blueprint” for how the private sector can support humanitarian delivery in conflict zones, though the pier project overall was viewed as a failure.
Fogbow is looking to expand its operations into new humanitarian crises. In interviews with The New Humanitarian, its president, Mick Mulroy, a decorated US marine and former CIA paramilitary officer, said the company has received requests to work in two other countries in Africa and three in the Middle East. He noted that interest in their services increased “once the USAID cut happened”, referring to reductions in US government funding for international humanitarian aid.
Mulroy said the firm’s pitch is that its personnel can leverage their extensive military experience to do humanitarian aid better. “We are taking the skills we have acquired, minus the lethality,” Mulroy said.
Food aid or counter-insurgency?
The involvement of private firms in humanitarian aid is nothing new. For decades, they’ve helped deliver food and supplies to people in need, whether working directly for government donors or contracted by international and local relief organisations. Military veterans have also long participated in aid security and logistics.
Fogbow itself has a small number of staff, no permanent office, and remains a minor player in the countries where it operates, typically only performing coordination roles on projects. In South Sudan and Sudan, it has organised logistics and given technical guidance on airdrops but has not flown planes or distributed aid.
Still, Fogbow’s growing presence has caused alarm among some aid workers, who fear the firm signals a shift to a new kind of aid sector – one where global donors and parties to conflicts use private firms to side-step humanitarian actors, and carry out politicised models of emergency relief that can put civilians in danger.
These dangers are most starkly illustrated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a US and Israeli-backed private organisation, with which Fogbow is not involved. Its disastrous and widely criticised model for distributing food led to over 200 Gazans being killed in May and June, according to the Gazan health ministry.
The New Humanitarian joined Fogbow and BAR Aviation on an airdrop in South Sudan earlier this month, taking off in the morning from Juba and flying northeast, towards the country’s borders with Sudan and Ethiopia. The flight delivered 16 metric tonnes of food into Nasir, a small, embattled town 25 kilometres from the Ethiopian border.
Nasir lies at the centre of a worsening conflict between the South Sudanese army and local militia groups. It has swapped hands twice since early March, and was recaptured by government forces in April. Much of the recent fighting has taken place between Nasir and the border. Its selection as a drop site has been deeply controversial.
On 12 June, Fogbow officials said more than half the food dropped during its operation thus far has been delivered to Nasir, yet the town was largely abandoned by civilians during intense fighting and government airstrikes in March and April.
Aid workers and locals said the town was almost entirely occupied by government personnel and soldiers when airdrops began in May – raising concerns that some food may have been used to feed troops – and that ongoing military operations in the area make it dangerous for civilians to return.
One 39-year-old man said he was among 200 troops who deserted their position in Nasir a few days before the food drops began in May, “because there was no food, water, or bullets being provided for us”, though he did not say whether the food delivered after his departure was used to feed soldiers.
Civilians who fled the fighting in Nasir, many of whom are residing in makeshift sites near the Ethiopian border, said they feared being entrapped if they returned to receive the aid, believing the government would target individuals suspected of belonging to the local militia – the White Army – or the country’s main opposition party, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in Opposition.
Others feared the food had been poisoned – a rumour spread, without evidence, by opposition leaders – or being labelled traitors by the opposition if they did return.
“People think only WFP (the World Food Programme) and UNHCR (the UN’s refugee agency) should provide food. They don’t trust the government,” said a 29-year-old who escaped Nasir and took refuge in Ethiopia. He described the food drops as “propaganda”.
“The same government that murdered its own people, doing bombardments, and burnt their homes into ashes is at the same time opting to deliver food to the same community.”
Albino Akol Atak, South Sudan’s minister of humanitarian affairs, said the drops are intended to benefit people who have been displaced by the fighting in Nasir and surrounding areas, and are the first step in a longer-term government plan to invest more in emergency response.
A local aid worker from Ulang – another location where food is being dropped – said communities are in desperate need of food but will only accept it if it’s distributed through trusted local leaders. “The same government that murdered its own people, doing bombardments, and burnt their homes into ashes is at the same time opting to deliver food to the same community,” he said.
Though some civilians have returned to Nasir to receive the food, opposition leaders and local NGO workers said these are primarily clan members of newly appointed government-allied commissioners. They also claimed that other officials pushing for drops in their villages are figures who have recently defected to the government and see the drops as a reward for their about-face.
Fogbow’s partnership with BAR Aviation, which is reported to have deep ties to the Ugandan military, has also caused controversy. In 2024, BAR Aviation aircraft were used in a joint operation by the Ugandan and South Sudanese militaries against the Lord’s Resistance Army, according to a Ugandan government document. Uganda is a longtime backer of South Sudan’s President, Salva Kiir, and has supported the government’s counter-insurgency efforts in recent months.
In a press release dated 29 May, the Ugandan airforce directly claimed credit for the food drops in Upper Nile state, where Nasir and Ulang are located. The document said that food was “airlifted by the UPDAF [Ugandan People’s Defense Airforce] and delivered to Ulang and Nasir Counties.” On 1 June, Chris Magezi, a spokesperson for the Ugandan military, told The New Humanitarian that they had “provided aircrafts” and “dropped relief items.”
South Sudan’s minister for presidential affairs, Chol Ajongo, said he was unaware of any aid being delivered by Uganda and said the airdrops were “purely South Sudan’s government’s responsibility.”
An “extension” of the government
Asked about the location of the airdrops, Hyslop, Fogbow’s director of humanitarian operations, said he had personally conducted “a deep dive” into data from various humanitarian sources on the planned intervention after the company was first approached by BAR Aviation.
The analysis showed that Nasir and Ulang were facing severe food insecurity, a cholera outbreak, and conflict. Based on those findings, he said Fogbow decided to proceed with discussions, though he emphasised that the drop sites were selected by the government and a local NGO.
Mulroy said Fogbow had also worked with WFP to “determine the right locations where people have the greatest needs”. A WFP spokesperson said the agency did not provide input into the drop locations and is not aware of what assessments were undertaken during the drops or how distributions were planned.
Atak, the minister for humanitarian affairs, said private companies were contracted because of the speed at which they hoped to roll out the operation, and because the government needed to fill gaps left by US funding cuts to humanitarian agencies.
Stephen Kueth, chairperson of the South Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, which oversees humanitarian activities in the country, was more open about the aid being intended to draw civilians back to the areas from which they had fled, and to improve the government’s image with communities displaced by the conflict.
“[The government needed to show] we are not against [civilians]... this is the way to bring them back,” said Kueth. “If we give the money to WFP, then [the local population] will not know who gave them the food, and they will be hostile to us,” he added.
A senior aid worker employed by a UN agency in South Sudan, and requesting anonymity to speak on a sensitive subject, said it would be difficult for Fogbow to claim it is working for strictly humanitarian reasons, given the lack of civilians in Nasir. They described the company as an “extension” of the government.
Kueth described the government’s relationship with Fogbow and BAR Aviation in similar terms. “They just accept what we tell them,” he said, adding that their operations would soon be concluded.
Some aid workers expressed concern about potential blowback on their own operations if the airdrops are seen as directly supporting a party to the conflict. After decades spent building trust in Upper Nile, and insisting on neutrality and impartiality (even if sometimes poorly implemented), they worry that such perceptions could fuel a broader distrust of humanitarian actors and threaten future access.
Hugo Slim, a humanitarian ethicist and senior research fellow at the Las Casas Institute at the University of Oxford, pointed out that some of the criticisms aimed at Fogbow could just as easily be applied to many Western aid agencies.
“[NGOs also] go on working at the behest of these governments, like South Sudan, and mopping up the mess their war crimes have made,” Slim said. “The key test is if they are really trying to be impartial on needs, or not.”
Other analysts said Fogbow’s relationship with the government fits into a broader pattern of the South Sudanese state manipulating humanitarian aid for political and military ends.
“It’s not just private companies that are instrumentalised by the government,” said Ferenc Dávid Markó, a conflict analyst specialised in South Sudan. “Since the 1990s, humanitarian aid has been used by both the government and rebel groups as a tool of population control and a means of acquiring revenue.”
Concerns raised in Sudan
Fogbow has also designed a proposal to drop food aid into a Sudanese city besieged by the RSF, according to a company document seen by The New Humanitarian. The company requested the plan not be made public, citing operational sensitives, so The New Humanitarian is not naming the city and is obscuring other details.
The proposal suggests using a foreign air force to airdrop 650 metric tonnes of food aid provided by the government of Sudan – which is led by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) – and picked up in Sudan’s wartime capital, Port Sudan.
Fogbow’s proposal states that a success criteria for its mission is the maintenance of neutrality and adherence to humanitarian principles. However, it also entails working on behalf of a government involved in conflict. Humanitarians fear the food aid will go to the military.
An aviation expert with experience supporting humanitarian organisations and conducting food drops in East Africa – and who reviewed the proposal for The New Humanitarian – noted that the RSF is equipped with surface-to-air missiles and man-portable air defence systems, or MANPADs. “If you don’t get clearance from the RSF, forget it. [This] would be a suicide mission,” they said.
RSF representative El Fadil Mansour said the group would not allow any airdrops or flights into the locality “under any circumstances”.
This recent proposal follows airdrops Fogbow was involved in last year in Sudan’s South Kordofan state, where it worked with the evangelical Christian humanitarian aid group Samaritan's Purse on a USAID-funded project.
The project came about as parts of South Kordofan were facing famine due to the conflict. An armed group called the SPLM/A-N controlled some of the south of the state, around the Nuba mountains, while militias aligned to the RSF were clashing with the SAF across much of the rest of South Kordofan.
The SAF was soon reduced to a series of embattled garrison towns, while fighting in the broader Kordofan region had forced people to flee into areas controlled by the SPLM/A-N where crop production had sunk precipitously.
Samaritan’s Purse approached USAID and received conditional approval for funding for the drops, according to a source in USAID familiar with the project. Negotiations then took place between the government of South Sudan (where the operation was based), the SAF, the SPLM/A-N, and Samaritan’s Purse, in which the airdrops were agreed to be divided between areas under SPLM/A-N control and SAF control.
The operation began at the end of October 2024, with BAR Aviation contracted to fly the planes and Fogbow – which had a contract for 60 days – chosen for logistics.
Sources within USAID said some of the food aid delivered to SAF-controlled areas was appropriated by the Sudanese army. Such diversion is not uncommon in Sudan, where the misuse of humanitarian aid has a long history and is regarded by many organisations as an unfortunate but accepted cost of operating.
One source involved with the project said the contract was not renewed due to general dissatisfaction with the company’s performance, and that efficiency improved afterwards. Fogbow denied that characterisation and said the contract ended amicably with both parties opting not to extend.
Ken Isaacs, vice president of programs and government relations for Samaritan's Purse, said Fogbow “completed the contract and we chose not to extend it”.
Hyslop said the operation demonstrated Fogbow’s ability to improve access in constrained environments. “Kordofan was a good example – an [international NGO] received a USAID grant, who did not possess the ability to run aid operations, but who also needed agreement from the government of Sudan, the SPLM-N, and the government of South Sudan,” he said. “Fogbow supported those negotiations.”
A plan for Gaza
Fogbow’s first undertaking was in Gaza. By early 2024, Israel had been imposing a near-total blockade on humanitarian aid and commercial goods entering Gaza for several months. The northern part of the territory was particularly cut off, and there were warnings of famine.
“After October 7 happened, it became clear to everyone that this was going to be long term, so the owners [of Fogbow] asked us to think about that problem,” Mulroy said.
The firm began working on a plan called Blue Beach, which proposed bringing food aid into Gaza by barge through removable beach landing sites. However, this plan was put on ice after President Joe Biden announced that the US military would build a floating pier to facilitate aid delivery into Gaza. Fogbow pivoted to running aid through the pier, or what the Pentagon was calling JLOTS (Joint Logistics Over-The-Shore).
From the outset, maritime aid delivery was criticised. Humanitarian officials said it was a distraction: The real problem was that Israel had closed land crossings, was obstructing aid efforts inside Gaza, and was trying to set up a parallel aid system under its control. Maritime delivery was much more expensive, could not bring in sufficient food aid for the population in need, and was seen as part of this parallel system.
JLOTS began operating in May but was closed in July after having become detached multiple times due to rough seas. At a cost of $230 million, the pier was functional for roughly 20 days of its two-month lifespan, bringing in less aid than what humanitarian groups said was needed for a single day in Gaza.
Fogbow became the fourth largest user of JLOTS – moving some 212 tonnes of aid – but the company faced resistance from the humanitarian community, according to interviews with Gaza and Israel-based aid workers from international NGOs and UN agencies.
Some said they were suspicious of Fogbow’s origins in US military and intelligence services; its readiness to insert itself into what was widely seen as a US-Israeli project; and were concerned the company did not have the humanitarian background to operate effectively.
At the same time, other aid workers pointed out that Fogbow’s operation was run in much the same way as those of the NGOs that also funnelled aid through the pier. Some aid workers were sceptical of Fogbow’s claim that its military expertise would benefit humanitarian operations.*
On its website, Fogbow described the project as a demonstration of how private sector innovation can support humanitarian efforts amid funding gaps and logistical challenges. “We offer a blueprint for how the private sector can help deliver aid at scale, even in the most complex circumstances,” it says.
Mulroy acknowledged that JLOTS “did not perform up to expectations”, but he said the Blue Beach plan was designed to be “impervious to sea states” and could have brought in the equivalent of 200 trucks of aid per day.
Back in South Sudan, the Nasir resident who escaped airstrikes said there is no way that displaced people will return back to receive the aid that Fogbow and the government dropped. “The government is saying they are getting civilians to receive food, but the displaced are denying it,” he said. “They say we are not going back.”
Kueth, the chairperson of the Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, said the airdrops would finish at the end of this month, even as Nasir and Ulang are at risk of famine. Few aid workers operating in South Sudan see Fogbow's limited government-controlled food drops as a viable solution to the crisis.
*(CORRECTION: An earlier version of this paragraph quoted a source stating that World Vision was among the NGOs using the Gaza aid pier. In fact, World Vision has not operated in Gaza since 2016.)
Edited by Philip Kleinfeld. Joshua Craze reported from London.
