Khartoum – The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Sudan’s Ministry of Finance today opened a three-day high-level forum bringing together government, businesses, financial institutions, international traders and development partners to devise a coordinated roadmap for Sudan’s economic recovery.

Sudan’s private sector remains central to reducing food insecurity and poverty for millions of people who cannot be reached by humanitarian assistance alone. But the country’s farmers and traders face limited access to finance, disrupted trade corridors, high operating costs and weak coordination. The Dialogue is designed to find ways around these bottlenecks.

Over three days of plenaries, technical panels, working groups, investment dialogues and B2B meetings, more than 300 participants (in person and online) – including Sudanese government ministries, the Central Bank of Sudan, the diplomatic corps of key trading partner countries, multilateral development banks, international financial institutions, commercial banks, farmers, traders, exporters and UN agencies – will move from identifying constraints to endorsing a shared roadmap for recovery.

Key themes under discussion include production and productivity, access to finance (including credit guarantees, takaful insurance, blended finance and diaspora investment), market systems and aggregation, trade and export facilitation, and policy and institutional reform.

Expected outcomes of the Dialogue include a private sector recovery action plan; an agreed framework for finance and investment coordination; strengthened partnerships among government, financial institutions, international trade partners, development partners and the national private sector; a roadmap for aggregation, trade facilitation and export promotion; and an alliance platform for private sector development and job creation along the agriculture value chain.

NOTES TO EDITORS

For more information, contact:

Abdullah Ismail, UNDP Sudan, Communications Analyst, abdullah.ismail@undp.org (mobile and WhatsApp +249 96 060 1747)