Juba, South Sudan
May 30, 2022 — The World Bank has approved a $70 million International Development Association grant to advance women’s social and economic empowerment in South Sudan.
This announcement came on Friday during a press conference in Juba by the World Bank Country Manager for South Sudan, Mr Firas Raad.
“This morning a new $70 million dollar grant that the World Bank board of directors approved to finance a government-led project aimed at boosting women’s social and economic empowerment in South Sudan,” Firas said.
“This is a four-year project that will be implemented by South Sudan’s Ministry of Gender, Child, and Social Welfare and will target around 91,000 women and 5,200 adolescent girls, and will indirectly reach more than 600,000 people in the country,” he added.
Firas pointed out that the scheme also focuses on building the capacity of women and the institutions mentioned to provide services.
“The explicit development objective of the project is to increase girls and women’s access to livelihood or entrepreneurial and gender-based violence services and to consolidate the government capacity to provide services”,he stressed.
He also emphasized that the project will expand in providing substantial support to physical and psychological trauma victims of sexual and Gender-Based Violence in the country.
Daniel Kiernan Balke, the World Bank Strategy and Operations Officer, vowed to ensure transparency during the implementation of the project.
“We have already identified a few guiding principles and they are consistent with what the country managers which is to ensure transparency and communicating the existing established facilities across the country, so that everybody can have opportunity to potentially be involved as well as ensuring transparency in the selection process,” he said.
For her part, the World Bank Gender Specialist in South Sudan, Charity Nyombe, said some training will be conducted for social workers both women and men across the country.
“We are going to have some training that will be conducted to not only women but also for men as champions of gender-based violence and also business and also within the women’s economic centre,” Nyombe said.
“Some of the training will be target 400-500 social workers in South Sudan and this will include women and also men,” she added.
The four-year project will be implemented in Central Equatoria State, Eastern Equatoria State, Western Bahr el Ghazal State, Unity State, and Warrap State.
The monetary institution says South Sudan Women and Social and Economic Empowerment Project will be directly implemented by the government of South Sudan with support from the International Organization for Migration.
The SSWSEEP comprises four components that aim at holistically addressing the specific challenges affecting the growth and development of women in South Sudan including; community-based socio-economic empowerment of women, establishing a women’s entrepreneurial opportunity facility; providing services for survivors of GBV; and supporting institutional strengthening and project management.
World Bank says the project will target 91,000 women and 5,200 adolescent girls, while indirectly reaching 673,400 people.
