Development

AI-generated editorial illustration created for Kandaka using OpenAI image generation. A fictional working harbour inspired by Port Sudan and its Red Sea setting—not a photograph, an exact view of the present port, an engineering design or an approved development project. A coast is an opportunity, not a business model Sudan’s Red Sea coast gives the country an opening to international trade. Turning that geography into prosperity, however, requires more than building deeper berths. The economic question is whether a port can connect Sudanese producers and consumers to useful services at competitive, dependable cost. ...

AI-generated editorial illustration created for Kandaka using OpenAI image generation. A fictional composite inspired by Roseires Dam, Sudan Railways and Gezira’s irrigated fields—not a photograph, an exact reconstruction, a single actual location or an approved project design. Transformation is an outcome, not a price tag Sudan’s most transformative investment might not be its largest structure. It might be the combination of a reliable power connection, a repaired irrigation system, a working freight link and a training programme that allows existing producers to sell more valuable goods. None makes a spectacular skyline. Together they can change an economy. ...

Atbara railway workshops, Sudan, 2008. Photograph by Bertramz, reproduced unmodified under CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. This historical photograph does not show current conditions. The problem was never simply the absence of a plan Sudan does not need to discover the idea of development planning. It needs to confront its own experience of it. The country has produced plans, trained professionals, built infrastructure and announced transformations. The harder question is why useful achievements so often failed to become a durable, inclusive system of prosperity. ...

Editorial illustration generated with Leonardo AI, Lucid Origin. Fictional scene, not documentary evidence of a uranium deposit. A mineral is not yet an industry Sudan should take its mineral possibilities seriously. It should take claims about their economic value even more seriously. Between identifying a mineral occurrence and establishing a viable industry lies a sequence of questions about evidence, costs, institutions, environmental protection and public benefit. Skipping those questions does not accelerate development. It makes development harder to judge. ...

Updated 18 October 2026 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. ...