 The World Bank’s LICUS project supported a capacity assessment of sixteen localities in four states of Sudan namely, South Kordofan, North Kordofan, Kassala and Blue Nile. Of the twenty localities originally targeted for the assessment, the team was not able to visit Abiya and Talodi (inaccessible at the time), Al Fola (staff were on strike) and Haiban (not yet formed). The assessment was carried out to assess capacity for these states and localities as they are included in the Community Development Fund (CDF) project funded by the MDTF-N. The findings will provide the basis for support from the project.
The assessment focused on: (i) compliance with a set of Minimum Qualifying Criteria (MQC) for accessing direct funding under the community development window of the CDF project; (ii) compliance with Capacity Building Support Access Criteria (CBSAC) for accessing funding under the capacity building window of the project; and (iii) establishing a baseline on a set of Performance Indicators against which improvements can be measured. Some of the key findings are: - Kassala and Blue Nile localities perform better; South Kordofan localities do worse.
- Urban localities do better than the rural localities, although Kadogli is and exception.
- Most localities do poorly on participation, development planning, transparency and accountability.
- Political institutions are weak.
- Human Resource Management is weak.
- Localities do relatively better on fiscal and financial management including procurement.
- No locality complies with all the MQC.
The findings are encouraging as the study indicates that localities have capacity to take on more than they currently do and capacity could be developed relatively easily within a suitable policy environment. A Synthesis Report “Assessment of Localities’ Compliance with Minimum Qualifying Criteria and identification of their Capacity Needs in Northern Sudan” and sixteen locality reports are found above. The work was carried out by COWI Consultants. The various criteria had been developed by Nordic Consulting Group (NCG) under and earlier consultancy. For further details please contact Vivek Srivastava, Senior Public Sector Specialist (Task Team Leader), World Bank, Washington D.C. ( vsrivastava@worldbank.org). |
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