Attachments
Highlights
■ The project reduced the number of land conflicts and increased residents’ perceptions of the effectiveness of local peace committees (90 percent confidence).
■ Reductions in the number of land conflict were largest among households from a minority tribe and female-headed households.
■ The project also increased school enrollment, meaning that a child in an implementation village was 11 percentage points more likely to be enrolled in formal schooling (95 percent confidence).
■ The project increased residents’ satisfaction with services, particularly administrative and sanitation services (95 percent confidence).
■ Exploratory results suggest that the project may have increased women’s perceptions of their voice in local decision-making.
■ The impact evaluation was possible because of the robust large-scale baseline household survey implemented at the outset of the project
Background
Achieving the international community’s goals for peace and poverty reduction requires addressing the needs of people in the world’s most fragile contexts. Darfur, Sudan, represents an extremely fragile region that has witnessed high levels of violent conflict for more than two decades. In 2020, as Sudan’s political space opened up after the fall of Omar al-Bashir’s regime, the United Nations 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. This brief presents findings from a rigorous impact evaluation of this PBF-supported intervention in Darfur.
Darfur shares many challenges with other parts of the Sahel where resources are scarce and governance is weak, and it also has seen high levels of violence for two decades. Many of the peacebuilding needs in Darfur have origins in conflicts that broke out in 2003. That year, rebel groups opposed to Bashir’s rule – the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) – attacked government installations in Darfur. Paramilitary groups allied with and supported by Bashir – referred to as the Janjaweed – retaliated with violence, leading to huge death tolls. The conflict cooled and conflict deaths declined after peace agreements were signed in 2006 and 2007 and the United Nations African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) deployed peacekeeping troops to the region, where their mandate would last until 2020. Deaths spiked again in 2013, with battles resulting both from armed groups challenging the state and from armed groups fighting each other. Although the number deaths and conflict events declined after 2016, the wounds from years of war remained raw and many of the underlying disputes about land and power remained unresolved.