COSTING METHODOLOGY FOR THE SUDAN JAM
INTRODUCTION
The Sudan Joint Assessment Mission (JAM) was carried out from April 2004 to February 2005 by eight cluster teams that were co-led by representatives from the Government of Sudan (GOS) and the SPLM, along with designated international cluster leaders from the UN and the World Bank. The eight teams undertook separate needs assessments for the National Government (NG), the Government of Southern Sudan (GOSS), the Northern States, and the Three Areas. Due to the unusually long duration of the assessment, cluster teams had several opportunities to visit Sudan, and to discuss needs and cost estimates in-depth with their Sudanese counterparts. Methods for estimating costs and presenting results have thus been more elaborate than would have been possible if the assessment had been conducted with the time constraints posed on other post-conflict needs assessments. Costs have been estimated from the bottom-up, and coordinated through a top-down macro approach. The exercise has been both complex and unique due to: (i) the agreement to assess and aggregate costs according to the four different levels of government; (ii) the close link to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), in particular the Wealth Sharing Protocol; and (iii) the lack of reliable population data, combined with large and uncertain population flows.
DEFINING PRIORITIES OVER THE SHORT AND THE LONG RUN
In determining the priorities of the Sudan JAM, as well as the costs of its implementation, the approach has been ambitious yet realistic in terms of what can be achieved during the Interim Period. The needs and priorities identified and costed in the JAM are sub-sets of total needs for Sudan, and represent incremental activities necessary to reach the MDGs. As a result, the amount of funding sought does not reflect the total needs of Sudan.1 Among major omissions from the JAM are costs related to debt relief, rehabilitation of social and economic infrastructure in Darfur, and a full-fledged DDR program. Sudan is in dire need of peaceful development, but at the same time the country's absorptive capacity is extremely low, and each cluster team has had to integrate this challenge in programme design and cost assessment. While teams have emphasized interventions that would provide "quick wins" and contribute to a tangible peace dividend, the longer-run development programmes will have been strengthened by a massive emphasis on capacity building activities and institutional development during the first two years. Large and capital- intensive investments in physical infrastructure are largely planned for Phase II, but will be accelerated if the necessary capacity and design work can be put in place earlier than exected.
OBJECTIVES
At the JAM Retreat in Nairobi in September 2004 central questions on financing were debated: How much will it cost to place Sudan on a path for achieving the MDGs by 2015? Will such costs differ for different areas of the country? What share of costs could be carried by domestic financing, and what share needs to be provided by donors? How should prioritization among needs be done, and how should priorities be linked with costing? How do we ensure consistency in estimating costs among the many JAM sub-sectors? How can we best support local initiatives?
These discussions, combined with recent international experience in post-conflict needs assessments and in costing the MDGs, resulted in the identification of three key objectives for the JAM costing exercise:
- To provide fairly detailed and credible costs, estimated with a consistent method;
- To agree on the domestic financing efforts and estimate external resources needed to implement the JAM strategy; and
- To inform and guide commitments and pledges at the Oslo Donors Conference.
Note 1 It is worth underscoring that the estimated costs of the Sudan JAM interventions are in line with MDG investment needs recently presented by the UN Millennium Project for Uganda, Tanzania, Ghana, Cambodia, and Bangladesh, which amounted to about $70-80 per capita in 2006. (Jeffery Sachs and others: "Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals", New York, 2005). MDG-related costs were remarkably similar across the five countries, mainly because many unit costs are similar across countries with different GDP/capita, and because there is a trade-off between capital and recurrent MDG-related costs, especially for infrastructure.
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