Economy

When considering South Sudan’s prospects for 2050, perhaps the largest unknown is the potential impact of technology on the country’s economy, social relations and politics. Technology provides ever-evolving possibilities to transform the economy and the aid sector and to mitigate challenges related to climate change and demographic growth. There is little accurate data on use of technology in South Sudan. As such, this note relies on estimates of technology use and emerging regional and global technological developments, more often posing questions rather than providing specific predictions about the implications of future technology use.

This Better Aid Forum briefing paper on technology and innovation is the first publication of the BAF briefing paper series.

The Conflict Sensitivity Resource Facility’s (CSRF) Better Aid Forum (BAF) is a series of events and discussions with different stakeholders to consider the long-term objectives and ambitions of the aid sector in South Sudan. It focuses beyond the timeframes of ongoing political and security dynamics in order to drive collective analysis about the approaches and principles that should underpin international engagement in South Sudan over the longer term.

In June 2019, a two-day event, the Better Aid Forum Experts Meeting, was held in Nairobi to reflect on findings from the Better Aid Forum process thus far, and debate how long-term trends may shape South Sudan’s context over the coming decades – and what this means for aid. The CSRF commissioned a number of input briefing papers that consider long-term trends underway in South Sudan, regionally, and globally that are likely to play a role in shaping South Sudan’s future.

This report that discusses opportunities provided by livestock in South Sudan referring to famine, access and conflict sensitivity is based on research conducted by Naomi Pendle and the Conflict Sensitivity Resource Facility (CSRF) in 2017. The research was funded by the UK, Swiss, and Canadian Donor Missions in South Sudan.

Displaced Tastes is a research project run by the Rift Valley Institute in partnership with the Catholic University of South Sudan under the X-Border Local Research Network. The project examines the changing tastes for food in South Sudan in the context of the country’s economic transition and place in the regional, cross-border economy of grain.

In the urban centres of South Sudan, people increasingly depend on markets to buy grains imported from South Sudan’s neighbours—particularly Sudan and Uganda—for their daily food. While this growing reliance on a cash-based regional economy of food is becoming more evident, much less is known about the lives of the people involved in the grain trade—the traders, transporters and millers—who provide South Sudan’s urban areas with staple foods like maize, sorghum and cassava.

To understand how grain is traded in South Sudan, and who by, Jovensia Uchalla examines the life stories of South Sudanese and foreign grain traders, transporters and millers in Juba. These stories talk of opportunities, shocks and changing tastes. Over the past half-decade, risks have risen and smaller traders have taken over from bigger ones. Most of the people discussed in this article moved into the grain trade after they suffered a shock in their previous jobs or shifted positions within the grain trade from drivers and loaders to millers and wholesalers.

This guide is a compilation of some of the forms of descriptive analysis that WFP and partners have undertaken since 1994.

This economy profile presents the World Bank Doing Business indicators for South Sudan. To allow useful comparison, it also provides data for other selected economies (comparator economies) for each indicator. Doing Business 2017 is the 14th in a series of annual reports investigating the regulations that enhance business activity and those that constrain it. Economies are ranked on their ease of doing business; for 2016 South Sudan ranks 187. Doing Business sheds light on how easy or difficult it is for a local entrepreneur to open and run a small to medium-size business when complying with relevant regulations. It measures and tracks changes in regulations affecting 11 areas in the life cycle of a business: starting a business, dealing with construction permits, getting electricity, registering property, getting credit, protecting minority investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts, resolving insolvency and labor market regulation. Doing Business 2017 presents the data for the labor market regulation indicators in an annex. The report does not present rankings of economies on labor market regulation indicators or include the topic in the aggregate distance to frontier score or ranking on the ease of doing business. The indicators are used to analyze economic outcomes and identify what reforms have worked, where and why. The data in this report are current as of June 1, 2016 (except for the paying taxes indicators, which cover the period January–December 2015).