Right from the time of decolonization, African countries have been emphasizing the need for regional cooperation and integration for accelerating the process of economic development. However, few if any, have sought to promote the existing non-official patterns and channels of inter-country trade among neighboring communities. Instead, many have inconvenienced such communities through establishing customs or security posts at the borders where locals have been peacefully trading for times immemorial. They have branded this trade “smuggling” and hence illegal. Yet, the same governments complain of limited inter-African trade. Governments restrict such trade because of their concern with revenue they lose from customs duties on trade with industrial countries. Governments are also concerned about possible loss of hard currencies they earn through established trade links with the industrial countries. They want these currencies for financing of their industrial imports and servicing foreign debts. Moreover, the official goal for regional integration is narrowly defined as just being the promotion of manufacturing. However, cross-border import substitution of agricultural products can release foreign exchange for non-agricultural imports. Improvement of transportation network across borders can boost inter-African trade, promote prosperity, development of regional markets, and boost the process of industrialization as incomes rise in the region. The paper will illustrate this phenomenon with examples of actual and potential cross-border trade along the Sudanese borders with Eastern and Central African countries.

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Can Cross-border trade between South Sudan and East Africa be Sustained?

Cesar A. Guvele
(Independent Scholar)

It is now almost ten years since USAID changed its strategy of providing handout food relief in the Equatoria region of southern Sudan to one of harnessing the skills, talents, and coping mechanisms of the local populace and providing opportunities for community empowerment. Consequently, external relief handouts have stopped in these areas. Farmers have produced surpluses, pastoralists have expanded cattle trading, and traders are stimulating monetization and engaging in trade with Uganda. The long term sustainbility of these efforts cannot be ascertained.
Whereas farmers and local communities have done their part to jumpstart profitable economic activity, donors and policy makers have let them down. Donors have emphasized the production of crops for farmers to fill their stomachs and not their pockets. The human resource building programs, which are very conspicuous in the proposals of aid agencies have remained mainly proposals. Credit programs are absent in most of the projects. The greatest proportion of project funds have been swallowed by administrative costs including huge salaries and allowances for persons with dubious qualifications and scopes of work, undocumented aimless travel, unproductive seminars, workshops and meetings. The project implementation policies have resulted in the proliferation of non-profit making NGOs through whom donor funds are preferably channeled at the expense of government institutions - the long term custodians of the projects.
Policy makers have failed to provide the necessary fiscal, monetary, and administrative environment for the poor to gain access to productive assets and to increase the returns on these assets. The CDCs have failed to provide an effective mechanism to encourage local participation by empowering them through drawing on, and the use of local talent and resources. Their role to provide an important point of contact, sounding board and conduit for external donor funded initiatives; and to play a critically important role in identifying needs/bottlenecks relating to the community, vet the validity and potential relevance of individual requests for donor help such as setting up stockists to improve external input availability, helping in marketing farm products in the more secure parts of the region, and rationalizing and, when possible, optimizing the synergies between different donor initiatives for the benefit of the community as a whole is compromised by interference and internal wrangling which make some of the positive efforts of the CDCs and DATT a drop of fresh water in a salty ocean.

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Among the many tragic and devastating catastrophes in addition to the great loss of life that have befallen southern Sudan since sovereignty is the destructive impact of the war on education for Southerners.

This paper will address: Deprivation of the South for decades of any meaningful education system. Estimated that the average teenage southerner has had less then two years of formal(rudimentary) schooling, Currently only 20-30 % of school age children are enrolled. Efforts in recent years by international NGOs with strong UNICEF support to establish over a thousand schools throughout the South. But the vast majority of children are still deprived of schooling.

Brief discussion of needs: Engaging more indigenous teachers, training same, increasing education infrastructure with schools & equipment(most classes are conducted out of doors) material support. A role for the ex-military in peacetime. Discussion on improving adult literacy; Sudan's overall is about 46% , for the South far less(1990 data).

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