South Sudan Community Leaders to Champion Inclusive Local Development

Policy LINK has also launched an online portal hosting all its publications, including a set of four resource guides offering step-by-step tips for inclusivity and stakeholder engagement, evidence-informed decision-making, and collaboration and mutual accountability.  

Leveraging USAID and European Union funds, Policy LINK has partnered with the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to establish a “champions group” of citizens working to center community needs in Aweil, capital of South Sudan’s Northern Bahr el Ghazal state. Bordering Sudan, the region is the site of cross-border attacks and devastating floods, drawing donor assistance that is often “supply driven,” says Jeffrey Campbell, Policy LINK’s Country Lead for South Sudan. 

Campbell and his team point to the newly formed Inclusive Champions Group, which includes a core leadership team of 14 local women, youth, and traditional leaders, as an example of “community first, but not alone”—a key principle of Policy LINK’s South Sudan work. Over the last two years, the team has worked with local groups across eight counties, of which five are in USAID’s Resilience Focus Zone, helping them prioritize their needs and communicate them to international donors and their implementing partners. 

The effort grew out of Policy LINK’s early support to the Partnership for Recovery and Resilience (PfRR), a UN-led coalition that includes 14 donors, 17 UN agencies, and 98 NGOs. Through its eight “building blocks approach” and the slogan of “community first, but not alone,” the PfRR seeks to reduce vulnerability, especially among rural populations coping with drought, conflict, and other “shocks and stressors.”  

Key to the partnership’s mandate is engaging local communities in determining their own needs. To ensure that community consultations reflect the priorities of a broad swath of the population, donor implementing partners working in some of South Sudan’s most vulnerable areas have turned to Policy LINK to help train local community leaders to champion a resilience agenda aimed at aligning aid programming with citizens’ needs.  

In January 2022, USAID/South Sudan’s third-party monitoring project gave high marks to Policy LINK for its engagement of local communities in neighboring Jur River. The USAID Monitoring, Evaluation, and Support Project (MESP) observed “high participation of groups such as women, youth, community leaders, and the private sector” from two payams in Jur River. A payam is an administrative division, representing at least 25,000 people, within a county. 

The newly formed ICG is part of a wide-reaching Policy LINK effort to catalogue its practices in South Sudan and lay the groundwork for sustained community engagement by other implementing partners. The team has also launched an online portal hosting all its publications, including a set of four resource guides offering step-by-step tips for inclusivity and stakeholder engagement, evidence-informed decision-making, and collaboration and mutual accountability.   

The formation and activation of the Aweil ICG follows a joint Policy LINK-FAO workshop on June 14-16, 2022, during which the more than 30 members of the group endorsed a terms of reference which identified the primary roles and responsibilities, term limits, succession plans, and measures for ensuring the ICG’s accountability to the community. Through Policy LINK’s facilitative leadership approach to achieving collaborative governance, the three-day workshop empowered and guided the participants through a process for selecting a core leadership team that would be more effective in liaising with an existing Aweil Area Reference Group and other stakeholders.   

The ICG’s core leadership group includes two female members fulfilling the roles of secretary-general and logistics secretary; a representative of persons with disabilities serving as deputy secretary-general; and a traditional leader in the role of deputy chairperson. The group’s charismatic chairperson hails from the State Ministry of Information. The group will work with the Aweil Area Reference Group to develop a joint work plan for addressing the most impactful shocks, coordinating its work with that of donors, and developing a “commitments matrix” to encourage accountability. 

Resources

Visit the Policy LINK South Sudan Resource Portal 

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