Reconstruction

The confluence of the Niles — Khartoum's founding geography and its future asset 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. ...

6-8 kWh/m2 per day - among the highest solar irradiance on Earth Sudan receives between 6 and 8 kilowatt-hours of solar energy per square metre per day – among the highest figures anywhere on the planet. The Nubian Desert, the Butana Plain, the Bayuda steppe: vast, flat, cloudless, and bathed in sunlight for 300 or more days a year. This is not a marginal resource. It is one of the largest untapped solar endowments in the world, sitting in a country that has, for most of its modern history, been unable to keep the lights on. ...