Donor conferences..Sudan reaps ashes

Report – Rehab Abdullah

Perhaps Sudan is waiting for the results of a new donor conference, which is effectively called high-level donations and pledges to the Central Emergency Response Fund, which will be held at the United Nations headquarters in New York on the sixth of next December.

The Head of the Sovereign Council, Lieutenant General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, received an invitation from the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, to participate in this event, in which the heads of donor countries and the heads of aid-receiving countries participate, with the aim of obtaining additional donations from donor countries to the Central Emergency Fund to confront emergency humanitarian situations in the world, including Sudan.

Failed experiments

It is evident that Sudan’s experience with donors has always been not good, starting with the signing of the Naivasha Peace Agreement, according to which South Sudan was separated, and there was a promise from the international community that Sudan would support this agreement. The first of these conferences was the Oslo Conference of 2005, but despite preparing all the projects and presenting them to the international community, they did not None of them will be fulfilled, and during the transitional period, 8 meetings of the Friends of Sudan were held in 2020, but they were only promises and none of them were implemented. What increases the pessimism and lack of optimism of these donor conferences is that in June 2023, two months after the outbreak of war in Sudan, Donors at the Geneva Conference for Emergency Response to the Crisis in Sudan pledged to provide about $1.5 billion to help alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Sudan, but as observers we do not know the fate of this amount yet.

Cautious optimism

Economist Dr. Muhammad Al-Nayer seems optimistic this time and expects that this conference will be different because it is not only concerned with Sudan, but it is concerned with the presence of all donor countries and countries benefiting from this fund, and therefore he saw in his statement to (Sudan Events) that this matter may be different from previous times, considering It is a global matter that addresses very many issues at the world level, and the United Nations has called for it, and there is a high probability that the leaders, whether donors or beneficiary countries, will meet, with a very large percentage of attendance and participation. He added that this may make donations and pledges their percentage estimated, and he expressed his hope that it will be achieved. Distributing what is donated to the Fund fairly to countries that are greatly affected by wars, such as Sudan, Gaza, and other countries. Therefore, Nair expected despite the previous bad experience of Sudan with donors and the international community, but this matter may be different, given that this fund is global and the call is global from the United Nations to find Donating countries, cutting the yoke if all the countries that have sovereign funds and surpluses donated, could address many of the issues of developing countries or countries suffering from wars.

Important opportunity

Although economist Dr. Haitham Fathi considered that the international donor conferences at the present time represent an opportunity for the transitional government to interact with the international community and discuss the Sudanese political and economic situation, but he asked during his talk to (Sudan Events) whether the government has a coherent economic and political strategy for the transitional period that includes performance measurement indicators for previous budgets and future budgets,

Including funding sources, funding gaps, and requests for donor assistance to fill funding gaps.

Pointing out that the outcomes of such conferences will reflect the position of the international community on helping Sudan in light of the economic crisis it is going through, and the skepticism of many Sudanese forces about the seriousness of the international community in supporting the peace process in the country.

Fathi sent a message to donors and said: If Sudan’s friends and donors are keen to help Sudan, they must begin establishing political, security, economic and social stability, and end the international isolation imposed on the country.

The harvest of ashes

However, the Dean of the Faculty of Economics at Al-Nilein University, Dr. Abdel-Azim Al-Muhall, though he started out not optimistic, pointed out to an important point regarding the use of donor funds once they were announced, and warned against spending the organizations entrusted with the task of disbursing them, as most of these funds are spent on administrative spending, which is characterized by With prosperity, in this case, I consider that Sudan will have reaped the ashes.Donor conferences..Sudan reaps ashes