Mr. Jonathan Edgar:

Thank you, Chairman. A great deal of information has been shared today and there has largely been consistency in terms of what the three key speakers have said. We in GOAL have been lobbying institutional donors and governments for some years regarding the situation in South Sudan. There is a lot of talk about transitional areas there, that is, areas which are moving into development from situations of humanitarian crisis or recovery. We never saw full evidence of that, however, even though the funding streams were moving in that direction and the rhetoric around some of the programming was reflecting it. We must keep in mind how long it will take to get back even to where we were before the conflict, which was not at all a positive place. Prior to the current crisis, there was a degree of optimism and the organisations working on the ground, including the United Nations and donor governments, are all pushing in the same direction. However, there remains an extremely long way to go.

In terms of assessing the situation in South Sudan compared with that in other countries, it seems clear that we are looking at a ten to 15-year timeframe rather than five years or something of that order. There must be a reality check in this regard. This is an already exacerbated situation which is being made much worse. There are deep-rooted issues that must be addressed as part of the resolution of the current crisis, which is essentially a cyclical response to those same issues. If they are not addressed in depth and detail, the same problem will occur in the coming years. From a value for money perspective as well as a humanitarian perspective, it should be the imperative of the international community to engage, once and for all, with conflict resolution in the region by grasping some of the nettles that have proved tricky in recent years.