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Summary
Darfur, Sudan, is a region that has witnessed high levels of violent conflict for more than two decades. It also shares many challenges with other parts of the Sahel where resources are scarce and governance is weak. In 2020, as Sudan's political space opened up after the fall of Omar al-Bashir's regime, the UN Secretary-General’s Peacebuilding Fund (PBF) invested over $20 million in projects aimed at addressing local conflict drivers in Darfur. The PBF-supported projects aimed to enhance good governance, provide durable solutions for the return of displaced people, and avoid further escalation of inter-communal disputes into violent conflict.
The intervention included a bundle of activities, including support for committees to resolve land disputes, provision of basic services, and support for an inclusive civil society, among others. It was implemented by a consortium of UN agencies—FAO, IOM, UNDP, UN-HABITAT, UNHCR, and UNICEF—and work was completed in mid-2022 despite security challenges in some parts of Darfur and national political upheaval late in implementation.
A year after the end of the projects in June 2022, war has returned to Darfur, as the conflict between the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese Armed Forces affects all of Sudan. Despite this macro-level conflict, it is still important to understand what local-level effects the PBF-supported interventions had on their target communities. More broadly, these bundled types of intervention have become increasingly common in recent years, but virtually no impact evaluation evidence exists about their effectiveness. To that end, this report presents an impact evaluation of the PBF's project in East Darfur.
According to our analysis, the PBF-supported project in East Darfur yielded positive effects on its target communities. The project reduced the number of land conflicts and increased residents' perceptions of the effectiveness of local peace committees, as compared to villages where no PBF-supported projects were implemented (90 percent confidence). The reduction in land conflicts represented about one fewer conflict for every 14 households—a meaningful amount, given that three quarters of households never had a land conflict to begin with.
For members of a minority tribe, there was a much bigger reduction in the number of conflicts: one fewer conflict for every four households. The project also increased school enrollment, meaning that a child in a PBF implementation village was 11 percentage points more likely to be enrolled in formal schooling (95 percent confidence). The project also increased residents' satisfaction with services, particularly administrative and sanitation services (95 percent confidence). A more tentative result suggests the project may also have increased women's perceptions of their voice in local decision-making. These results align with what residents told our research team in interviews: PBFsupported peace committees led to reconciliations, and the improved services reduced local sources of conflict.
This analysis is based on a rigorous quasi-experimental research design utilizing finegrained household survey data collected in communities where PBF-supported projects were implemented and in those where they were not. Although PBF-supported projects were implemented across all five states of Darfur, our impact evaluation focuses only on East Darfur, because it was the only state where implementation patterns and available baseline data met the technical requirements for an impact evaluation. Both baseline and endline data were collected by enumerators from IOM's Displacement Tracking Matrix team. Our endline data, collected in February and March 2023 before the war began, includes surveys from 3,512 individuals from 2,376 households.