Development

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) ...

Khartoum was not a beautiful city. Decades of under-investment, uncontrolled sprawl, and governance failures had produced a capital with inadequate water, intermittent power, congested roads, inadequate sewerage, and housing that lagged far behind population growth. The urban planning studies conducted before the war documented these problems in detail. Then the war came, and made everything worse by an order of magnitude. What Sudan’s urban war has done to Khartoum — and to Omdurman, Khartoum North, and the metropolitan area that is home to some eight to ten million people — is still being quantified. But the scale is clear enough: residential neighbourhoods destroyed, public buildings gutted, utilities infrastructure shattered, the central business district a battlefield, hospitals looted and bombed, entire quarters of Omdurman reduced to rubble. The displacement has been the largest internal movement of people in Sudanese history. ...

Sudan is one of Africa’s largest gold producers. In recent years before the 2023 war, official exports exceeded 40 tonnes annually — and the informal, undeclared trade was estimated to be several times larger. The country also holds substantial reserves of chromite, iron ore, copper, zinc, manganese, uranium, and several other commercially significant minerals. By geological endowment alone, Sudan is not a poor country. Yet almost none of this wealth has translated into development. The gold gets extracted, much of it illegally, and moves — through the UAE, primarily — into international markets with minimal benefit to Sudan beyond whatever the diggers themselves earn in often dangerous conditions. The processing, refining, trading, logistics, and finance that capture most of the value in a mining supply chain all happen elsewhere. ...

In 1955, the year before Sudanese independence, the Sudan Railways network stretched across 4,756 kilometres of track. It connected Khartoum to Port Sudan on the Red Sea, south to Sennar and Kosti on the White Nile, west through Kordofan to Nyala in Darfur, north along the Nile to Wadi Halfa on the Egyptian border. It was, at independence, one of the most extensive rail networks in Africa — the physical infrastructure of a country that moved its cotton, its sorghum, and its people on steel rails through the desert. ...

The Nile flows through Sudan for approximately 1,900 kilometres. The Blue Nile descends from the Ethiopian highlands through Sennar and Kosti. The White Nile flows from Uganda through South Sudan and Malakal. They join at Khartoum. The combined river then flows north through Sudan’s dry core, past the ancient cataracts, through the Nubian Desert, and into Egypt. By volume, more than 80 percent of the Nile’s water originates in Sudan’s catchment — the Ethiopian highlands via the Blue Nile and Atbara — before flowing through or past Sudan entirely. ...

There is a development intervention so well-proven, so cost-effective, and so politically straightforward that it is almost surprising more countries have not made it a universal right. It is not a new technology or a complex financial instrument. It is a meal — a hot lunch, served at school, every day. School feeding programmes are among the most extensively studied policies in development economics. The evidence is unambiguous: they increase school enrollment, reduce dropout rates, improve learning outcomes, and disproportionately benefit girls. When designed well — with food sourced from local farmers — they also serve as agricultural subsidy programmes, injecting cash into rural economies while feeding children in urban and peri-urban schools. The return on investment, according to multiple World Food Programme analyses, averages nine dollars for every one dollar spent. ...

The Nile enters Sudan near Wadi Halfa in the north and flows south through Dongola, Khartoum, Kosti, and Renk before crossing into South Sudan — a journey of nearly 1,850 kilometres. For most of this distance, the river is wide, deep, and navigable. It passes through the heart of the country’s agricultural zones, connects its largest cities, and reaches populations that road infrastructure has never reliably served. Sudan has one of the world’s great natural highways running through the middle of it. For most of the country’s modern history, this highway has been almost entirely unused for freight. ...

In 2011, South Sudan became independent and took with it approximately 75% of Sudan’s oil revenues. The Bashir government, which had built its entire fiscal architecture around oil — funding the military, buying political loyalty, subsidising fuel and bread to suppress urban discontent — suddenly faced a structural collapse. Oil revenues fell from $6 billion annually to under $500 million. The government needed a replacement. It found one underground. Sudan’s gold sector, which had been significant but secondary during the oil years, was rapidly expanded through a combination of artisanal small-scale mining and commercial concessions. By 2012, gold had become Sudan’s largest export earner. By 2014, Sudan was producing approximately 70 tonnes annually, making it the third largest gold producer in Africa after South Africa and Ghana. ...

In 1946, the British colonial administration commissioned a study of Sudan’s agricultural potential. The findings were unambiguous: Sudan possessed more cultivable land than any country in Africa, fed by the Nile and its tributaries, with a climate capable of producing cotton, sorghum, sesame, groundnuts, gum arabic, fruits, and vegetables at commercial scale. The report concluded that Sudan could, with proper investment, feed not just its own population but much of the African continent and the Arab world. ...