Development

Cover: Original illustration commissioned by Kandaka, 2026. Money is a promise. A Sudanese pound is accepted today because the person receiving it expects somebody else to accept it tomorrow. When that confidence disappears, households and businesses protect themselves with dollars, gold, goods, property or anything else likely to hold value. Sudan’s monetary crisis is therefore not a narrow problem for the Central Bank. A farmer cannot price an imported pump when the exchange rate may change before harvest. A factory cannot plan when wages, power, machinery and working capital move at different speeds. A bank cannot make useful long-term loans when repayment money may lose much of its value. Stable money is development infrastructure. ...

An accountable production plan must connect farms, power, processing, skills and transport. Original illustration commissioned for Kandaka. Sudan does not need another document that promises everything to everyone. It needs a plan that makes choices, names who must deliver them, and allows citizens to see—year by year—whether anything changed. That distinction matters because Sudan is not merely discussing a future plan. The government has been preparing a national 2026–2030 Five-Year Strategic Plan. In April 2026, the Cabinet Secretariat described reconstruction, peace, productive projects, youth employment, agriculture, livestock and mining as central themes. A later workshop called for a shift from planning by activities to planning by results and impact, and for infrastructure to be linked directly to production. By May, federal ministries were submitting their own five-year plans for consolidation. (Cabinet workshop, 8 April; planning guidelines, 24 April; ministerial coordination, 20 May) ...

Cover: Original illustration commissioned by Kandaka, 2026. Sudan already possesses one of Africa’s largest livestock populations. Yet having an enormous number of animals is not the same as having a powerful livestock industry. The distinction can be seen in Sudan’s own trade figures. According to the Central Bank of Sudan, live animals earned approximately $287 million in the first half of 2026. Sheep accounted for most of that value, followed by camels. During the same six months, recorded meat exports were worth only about $0.55 million, while hides and skins earned about $1.78 million. ...

This is a living reference, updated periodically as conditions and priorities change. As of mid-2026, Sudan’s war is in its fourth year; the army has recaptured Khartoum and national institutions officially returned to the capital in January 2026, bringing a fragile, partial normalcy to central Khartoum even as fighting continues elsewhere, notably Darfur. That makes this a reconstruction-planning document, not a hypothetical one. Why This Matters Now Sudan’s cities were shaped by a century of planning that consistently deprioritized ordinary residents. The 1930s colonial-era plan for Khartoum built a European-style core with boulevards, a botanical garden, and storm drainage — but explicitly excluded Omdurman and Khartoum North, pushing “native villages” beyond the railway line with no equivalent investment. Every plan since — the 1991 Doxiadis structure plan, the 2008–2033 KPP5 plan — repeated the pattern: infrastructure for the center, informal growth and neglect at the margins, and green space treated as the first casualty when budgets tightened. ...

Sudan is fighting two crises that are usually discussed separately and are, in fact, one problem. Its electricity system has partially collapsed, and its economy has been unable to convert the end of conflict into durable development for as long as anyone can remember. Reliable power is the precondition for reviving agriculture, restarting industry, and running clinics and schools. The institutions, financing, and investment climate needed to build that power system are themselves casualties of the same decades of conflict that broke the economy. Treating energy reconstruction as a technical side project, separate from the harder political-economy questions, is how Sudan ends up rebuilding the same fragile system twice. ...

Published June 9, 2025 — the most current economic assessment of Sudan from the World Bank. Almost two years into the conflict that erupted in April 2023, Sudan is trapped in a deepening crisis. Key Numbers Indicator Figure GDP contraction 2023 −29.4% (one of the steepest in modern history) GDP contraction 2024 −13.5% Extreme poverty (< $2.15/day) 33% (2022) → 71% (2024) Unemployment 32% (2022) → 47% (2024) Inflation 2024 170% year-on-year Forcibly displaced 12.9 million — the world’s largest displacement crisis Return to pre-conflict GDP Not before 2031, even with rapid peace What the Report Recommends The report’s recovery framework rests on three pillars: ...

Robert O. Collins · Cambridge University Press · Available in the Kandaka Library Collins’s A History of Modern Sudan is the standard English-language reference for Sudan’s political history from the Turco-Egyptian conquest of 1820 through the late post-independence period. It is the work that contextualises every economic analysis, every development plan failure, and every institutional crisis discussed elsewhere in the Kandaka library. You cannot read the World Bank’s 2015 Country Economic Memorandum, or the Industrial Location Analysis, or any analysis of the Gezira Scheme, without the political and institutional history this book provides. ...

Iman Sharif · Academic paper · Available in the Kandaka Library Sudan’s first post-independence government was not without ambition. The Ten Year Economic and Social Plan (1961–1970) set targets for agricultural expansion, manufacturing development, infrastructure investment, and social services that reflected a genuine attempt to use independence to build what colonialism had prevented. This paper analyses that plan — its design, its early implementation, and its abandonment by 1965 — as a diagnostic of the structural constraints that have defeated every subsequent Sudanese development programme. ...

Khalid Idris · Academic study · Available in the Kandaka Library The most rigorous empirical study of Sudan’s industrial geography available in the Kandaka library. Idris traces the location decisions of Sudan’s manufacturing sector from the colonial period through 1980, using systematic data to show that the geographical concentration of industry in Khartoum was not a natural market outcome — it was produced by deliberate colonial infrastructure investment and perpetuated by post-independence policy failure. ...

World Bank · 2015 · 226 pages The most important economic document in the Kandaka library. Written at the moment Sudan hit rock bottom — 75% of fiscal revenue gone with South Sudan, the Gezira Scheme in collapse, gold and gum arabic the only remaining export earners — it is the most comprehensive and actionable analysis of Sudan’s economic predicament and potential. Core Finding A 2% annual increase in crop agriculture productivity would: ...