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Case Studies>>The UNDP Sudan Strategic Partnership with UK-DFID, Dutch Development Cooperation
After over two decades of civil war between North and South Sudan there was some urgency on the part of the development partners to re-engage with the country and kick-start post-conflict recovery through a package of interventions designed to underpin the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA).
DFID, Dutch Development Cooperation and Danida negotiated the creation of a funding mechanism to assist UNDP to better coordinate and focus its development efforts on a number of key areas of the CPA where it had a comparative advantage – democratic governance, rule of law, access to justice and post conflict early recovery. In addition to underpinning key areas of the CPA, the Strategic Partnership (SP) framework also sought to align its approach to UN reform by contributing to UNDP Sudan’s capacity to: (i) programme more strategically; (ii) improve the quality of its technical assistance; (iii) provide a sharper focus on fewer activities; and (iv) to create a more predictable flow of programme funds. The 3-year Partnership (2005 to 2007) had a budget of $54m.
To support the CPA and deliver some quick gains UNDP initiated some 19 projects between mid-2004 and 2005. However, by 2006 the technical requirements of revising and up-streaming these preparatory initiatives into full project documents and ensuring a coherent SP programming approach became apparent to both senior UNDP managers and the funding partners. SDDirect provided a consultant who had a working knowledge of the UN system’s operational procedures. Key technical inputs provided by the SDDirect consultant included advice on UNDP project execution, resource and administration systems, refining the SP evaluation ToR and methodology,leading the joint donor SP evaluation team, reviewing the Strategic Partnership’s alignment to Sudan's national strategies and plans, preparing a set of key recommendations for the next SP phase and ways of improving partnership working and completing various technical documents for DFID’s resource management and information systems.
The evaluation concluded that the UNDP Sudan Strategic Partnership (SP) arrangement has proved to be a useful complementary funding mechanism to that of the World Bank-administered Multi-Donor Trust Funds (MDTFs) particularly in the areas of governance, rule of law, access to justice and early recovery. The primary focus of the majority of projects was on capacity building and institutional development of federal, state and local government institutions in support of CPA implementation. In addition a number of projects had a significant level of engagement with civil society organisations either as lead partners, sub-contractors or as clients.
We found that UNDP had been able to start many of these projects much quicker than other donor-funded initiatives and that the Strategic Partnership had played an important role in underpinning the Comprehensive Peace Agreement and thereby filled an important gap in Sudan’s aid architecture.
Analysis of the Strategic Partnership’s programmatic impact drew attention to limitations in Sudan’s national strategic framework – the CPA and the Joint Assessment Mission (JAM). As these national instruments had never been adequately prioritised or fully costed the SP project portfolio had grown in an un-prioritised fashion, sometimes reducing impact. We recommended that in a future SP phase greater efforts are needed by UNDP to integrate the project portfolio into mainstream government and national systems. In particular both the 5-year National Strategic Plan and the MDG-based Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRS) provide opportunities to establish stronger linkages to government planning, budgeting and reporting processes.