WORLD BRIDGE BLOG

The Financial Times headline sounds the alarm: “Fury at unspent funds for Sudan.” It seems that donor governments are furious at the World Bank for spending only $181 million out of the $524 million in donated funds from the fund it manages to support the recovery and development of local communities in south Sudan. After twenty years of war and five years of relative peace, the failure to provide adequate assistance to refugees and internally displaced people as they return to their war-torn villages, is one of the primary reasons why south Sudan remains one of the poorest and most vulnerable places on the planet.

But let’s probe a little further here. Beating up on the World Bank is probably quite satisfying, but the donor governments involved need to hold up a mirror to themselves. First, expecting the World Bank to disburse funds for local development quickly is the equivalent of expecting an elephant to ice skate; it’s just not built to do that. Second, if donors are so anxious to see funds spent quickly, why didn’t they commit their own funds to aid groups and local governments, where the capacity exists, to respond to the needs of people as they begin to re-build their communities? Establishing the World Bank managed Multi-Donor Trust Fund in the first place, was a cop-out to cover up the donors’ own collective lack of institutional means and capacity to make a smooth transition from emergency funding to support for recovery and long-term development.

In southern Sudan and other places emerging from conflict, what is needed are flexible funds available in relatively small amounts to get resources quickly into the hands of NGOs, community organizations, and local governments to initiate projects that are planned with local people and will make a difference in their lives. “Early recovery” is the jargon for this set of activities. The UN Development Program (UNDP) is supposed to be leading the early recovery cluster, but their institutional capacity to reach rural communities is virtually nil.

So until UNDP devotes the necessary resources to grow into the cluster leadership role, ad hoc donor consortia with joint planning capacity that links to the host government will probably be the best way to mobilize funds. But donors have to commit to making this happen by solving their own institutional problems in allocating funds for recovery from emergency and development budgets, which are too often separate. As for the World Bank, let them do what they are built to do-- give long-term development advice and the loans to back that advice up, even if it does take months for the negotiations to be concluded.

In the meantime, communities in south Sudan-- as well as places like Congo, Afghanistan and Pakistan-- are waiting for meaningful support for local-level action that will make the difference between sustained return and reintegration, and failure that drives people into urban areas or into banditry and renewed conflict. The human and security stakes are too high for the perennial problem of recovery funding not to be solved.