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Western donors on Thursday criticised a World Bank-run fund for failing to pay out millions of dollars to development projects in war-ravaged South Sudan, saying it had been tied down by red tape.The World Bank Multi Donor Trust Fund (MDTF) was set up as one of the main ways for donors to funnel cash to the oil- producing region following its two-decade civil war.
Donors had given the fund $524.1 million since Sudan's north- south war ended in 2005, but only $188.1 million has so far been spent, said Michael Elmquist, the head of a donor umbrella group including the governments of Britain, Norway and Canada.
He said there were now serious doubts whether the World Bank would be able to process the rest of the funding before a deadline of the end of 2011, and projects to build new schools and health centres had suffered.
"The (Fund's) legal and fiscal procedures ... in retrospect may have been too cumbersome for operating in an environment like South Sudan," Elmquist, the head of the Sudan Joint Donor Team, told Reuters. "Disbursement ... has been much slower than the donors expected."
The head of the World Bank's South Sudan office, Laurence Clarke, declined to comment. Clarke told the Financial Times on Wednesday there had been criticism from donors, but defended the Fund's record.
"The realities on the ground dictated a slower start-up and a certain maturing process," he said.
The World Bank's website says that corruption and funds mismanagement were seen as a high risk in the south, necessitating "special measures".
The aid group Oxfam said the World Bank's strict rules had also made it difficult for development organisations, particularly Sudanese groups, to apply for funding.
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"It is the biggest fund for South Sudan but it has been slow and ineffective," said Oxfam's policy advisor for the south, Maya Mailer.
"It's pretty unacceptable -- you have one of the poorest places in the world with a fund that has been plagued with delays and hasn't translated into tangible dividends, especially in education and health."
South Sudan's semi-autonomous government, set up in the 2005 peace deal that ended the war, acknowledged there had also been problems on its side.
"It's a failure but it's not just the World Bank ... The government of South Sudan did not have the capacity to absorb the funds," Aggrey Tisa, an undersecretary in the south's Finance Ministry, told Reuters.
