The MDTF-South Strategy

Building on the cooperation and lessons learned during the Joint Assessment Mission (JAM), the operational strategy of the Multi-Donor Trust Fund-South (MDTF-S) is to be a central partner of the Government of South Sudan (GOSS) in key sectors. There will be special emphasis on ownership and capacity building, as well as on enabling GOSS to prioritize among a vast array of recovery and development needs. This would permit expeditious decision-making and phasing of investments and provide a basis for scaling up.

The strategic objectives for the MDTF-S suggest a balance across five key areas:

• Establishing an effective core of public sector administration, including core capacity to plan and finance GOSS programs with key accountability mechanisms in place;
• Preparing selected investments to consolidate the peace and generate social capital through access to basic services with rapid scale-up of education programs; and
• Putting priority sector programs in place, including basic infrastructure (roads, electricity, water) education, and health;
• Supporting preparation of programs, including agriculture and private sector development to facilitate the transition from subsistence-based livelihoods to a development-oriented economy;
• Harmonizing development assistance.

Several cross-cutting strategic objectives will also be addressed, including explicit recognition of the regional dimension in all programs, and the importance of transparency and accountability. The risk of funds mismanagement and corruption is high and requires special attention. Large-scale public sector programs supported by donors should be designed to avoid crowding out the nascent local private sector and civil society. Specific measures are being put in place to ensure that each of these risks is addressed on a systematic basis.

Southern Sudan is quite unique among low income post-conflict situations in terms of the amount of domestic resources available in the immediate post-conflict period. In this context, the comparative advantage of the MDTF-S, much like the MDTF-National, resides not only in its financial muscle, but equally if not more in its ability to help establish robust sectoral programs that can expand to scale to bring much needed technical assistance to ministries and to support transparency and good fiduciary standards for large contracts. The GOSS budget is critical to the strategy and success of the MDTF, not only as the primary means of actually financing development programs, but in a broader sense as an indication of GOSS priorities (which should be subject to parliamentary and public debate and scrutiny) and as the key signal to inform donor choices and partnership across sectors.

[Back to top]