Enhancing Community Resilience and Local Governance Project Phase II

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1. South Sudan has been beset by decades of armed conflicts and ranks as one of the least developed countries in the world today. Southern Sudan, as the region was called before independence, has been marred by conflict since 1955, just a year before Sudan attained its independence from British colonial rule. The region experienced systematic marginalization and underdevelopment under both British and Sudanese rule, inhibiting it from developing its physical and human capital. Consequently, at its independence in July 2011, South Sudan ranked near the bottom of global development indicators, with little infrastructure, basic services provided almost entirely through humanitarian aid, and an economy completely dependent on oil. 2. Poverty in South Sudan is widespread, chronic and increasing. Poverty is likely to have increased from 76.8 percent in 2020 to about 78.2 percent in 2021. Chronic and widespread poverty contributes to South Sudan’s ranking of 185 out of 189 countries in the Human Development Index (HDI) 2020, with a life expectancy of only 58 years compared to the global average of 72. Poverty in South Sudan is multidimensional and is driven by many factors. Foremost is violent conflict, which has persisted since the signing of the R-ARCSS in 2018. Other factors include the macro-economic crisis, declining incomes, inflation, and the impacts of climate change, natural hazards, displacement and COVID. As a result, much of the population has sunk into a state of destitution with extremely low rates of food security, immobility due to insecurity and COVID, and very poor access to basic services. IDPs are particularly impoverished with an estimated 91 percent below the poverty line compared with 86 percent of rural and 75 percent of urban residents in 2016. 3. South Sudan is highly prone to hydro-meteorological hazards and vulnerable to climate-related shocks that have devastating impacts on people’s welfare. Seasonal rainfall is erratic and varies under the influence of the annual shifts of the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone, which makes South Sudan prone to both recurrent droughts and floods. Since independence in 2011, the country has suffered severe droughts and floods, severely impacting the country’s development efforts. The most recent floods (May-November 2021) – reportedly the most devastating since the early 1960s – are estimated to have affected between 9 out of 10 states, impacting 800,000 to 1.2 million people, and displaced more than 300,000 people. Damages to physical assets are estimated at US$671 million with extensive damages to infrastructure, cropland and agricultural facilities. With approximately 95% of the population dependent on rain-fed agriculture and pastoralism for their livelihoods, South Sudan is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and climate variability. , The average annual temperature across South Sudan is projected to increase by approximately 1−1.5°C by 2060, while extreme heat days, prolonged dry spells and heavy rains will become more frequent. The successive years of severe flooding demonstrate how the seasonality, duration and intensity of the rainy season is shifting affected by climate variability factors like El Nino Southern Oscillation and under influence of climate change.4. South Sudan’s humanitarian and development crises, the outcome of the compounded shocks of conflict, climate change and disasters, need to be addressed holistically through interventions that foster resilience among vulnerable communities in the face of these risks. Climate change has made devastating floods a perennial event in South Sudan, destroying crops, disrupting markets, and forcing people to flee in search of food and shelter. The movement of flood-displaced people, which also often entails mass movement of livestock, can exacerbate contestation over scarce natural resources, such as water sources or grazing grounds, with host communities. This contestation often maps onto existing ethnic, communal, cultural, inter-generational, and political tensions, and can be instrumentalized by political and security elites to advance personal interests by fomenting violence. Communities across the country have leveraged traditional and customary institutions and innovative local peacebuilding initiatives to manage conflict risks borne of the climate-disaster nexus. However, political, governance, and legal institutions adequate to addressing such conflicts over scarce resources without violence are lacking. As climate-related disasters in South Sudan increase in frequency and intensity, there is an urgent need not only for interventions providing physical infrastructure to help communities to withstand shocks, but for institutions at appropriate levels that can effectively mediate the resulting social and political tensions.5. In light of the situation, the Enhancing Community Resilience and Local Governance Project (ECRP-I, P169949) was designed to improve access to basic infrastructure and to strengthen community institutions in vulnerable counties in South Sudan. ECRP-I, which became effective in September 2020, leveraged the experience of the Bank-financed Local Governance and Service Delivery Project (LGSDP, P127079) and focused on strengthening community-level infrastructure delivery and community institution strengthening. Due to fiduciary concerns, however, the project shifted from government-led to a third-party implementation approach where United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) acts as the Project Management Unit (PMU) with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) provides complementary support. Despite some delays primarily due to insecurity and flooding, ECRP-I is now implementing subprojects in 13 of the 21 target counties across the country. 6. While ECRP-I has made good progress, there have been some emerging lessons that have led the Bank to design ECRP-II instead of scaling up the ECRP-I with additional financing. These include: (i) low government ownership due to ECRP-I’s third-party implementation approach and positive reforms the government has embarked on since have encouraged a shift to government-led “hybrid” implementation under ECRP-II; (ii) ECRP-I’s three-year project period is proving too short for a community-driven development (CDD) approach that requires many cycles of learning-by-doing. Further, considering the insecurity and flooding that render many counties inaccessible requires a longer project period. ECRP-II will thus be a five-year project; (iii) youth unrest has hampered project implementation necessitating a more constructive youth engagement. ECRP-II will proactively engage youth in planning, training, construction, and maintenance phases of the project; (iv) impacts of recurrent floods have made already destitute communities even more vulnerable requiring a robust flood risk reduction engagement. ECRP-II has added a subcomponent for flood risk reduction and institution strengthening on DRM; (v) gender inclusion has been good quantity-wise under ECRP-I, but quality needs to be deepened. ECRP-II will not only focus on ensuring women’s representation but also on ensuring that women’s voices are reflected in the decision-making; (vi) operation and maintenance (O&M) requires a concerted effort and more resource allocation. ECRP-II has built in a subcomponent that specifically supports different types of O&M depending on the locality and types of infrastructure; (vii) ECRP-II has introduced performance-based grants for both communities and county governments to incentivize behavioral change; and (viii) as an exit strategy from ECRP-II’s “hybrid” approach, where government is the recipient but still contracts out most of the activities to a third-party, to a full government implementation approach, ECRP-II puts the government in charge of some key activities such as measuring performance of the county governments and community institutions and dete