SOUTH SUDAN’S INFRASTRUCTURE: A CONTINENTAL PERSPECTIVE On the other hand, distributional losses are modest relative to other parts of Africa, revenue collection is promising, and labor productivity is better than several African benchmarks. Thirty percent of water production is lost due to leakages in the system. These losses, however, are comparable to what is observed in African middle-income countries and are modest relative to East Africa and South Sudan’s resource-rich peers. Over 80 percent of the bills are collected, which is comparable to East Africa and other low-income countries and significantly better than what other resource-rich countries recover. At 107 connections per employee, labor productivity, while better than East Africa and Sudan, falls short of the average productivity of a utility in middle-income countries at 200 connections per employee.

In monetary terms, the Upper Nile Water Corporation loses $1 million annually due to various inefficiencies. The hidden costs are slightly less than in Kenya and Ethiopia, which lose up to 150 percent of their revenues due to hidden costs. For South Sudan, minimizing losses to improve the financial viability of the utility requires addressing the cost-recovery situation, redressing system losses, and improving collections (table 10).

**Table 10. Operational indicators for 2005**

|Utility|Water<br>delivered<br>(million<br>m<sup>3</sup>/year)|System<br>losses (%)|Collection ratio<br>(%)|Average total<br>cost ($/m<sup>3</sup>)|Average<br>effective tariff<br>($/m<sup>3</sup>)|Total hidden<br>costs ($ million/year)|Total<br>hidden<br>costs (%<br>revenues )|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|Upper Nile Water<br>Corporation|**3**|**29**|**83**|**1.13**|**0.85**|**1**|**113**|

_Source:_ Derived from Briceño-Garmendia, Smits, and Foster (2009). _Note:_ For South Sudan water delivered (million m<sup>3</sup> /year) and total hidden costs ($/year) are reported as the sum of the utilities; the other indicators are calculated as weighted averages. Average total cost per cubic meter was calculated assuming a unit capital cost of 40 cents.

# Energy

## **Achievements**

Except for some investment in electricity distribution in two small towns, South Sudan has had no significant achievements in recent years in the electricity sector. Some leeway is being made in carrying out feasibility analysis of micro hydropower plants but no projects have materialized.

## **Challenges**

South Sudan’s power infrastructure is in an embryonic state, its development severely curtailed by years of civil war (figure 14). The power network consists of a few disjointed generation plants in urban centers. Despite the rich hydropower potential, the power is generated through expensive diesel generation. Estimates suggest that South Sudan has between 25 megawatts (MW) and 62 MW of installed capacity (table 13), or around 3 MW per million people. This is a small fraction of what has been installed in East Africa on average, with installed capacity per million people significantly lagging all other regional African benchmarks. Megawatts per million people in South Sudan equals that of Chad and is around 12 percent of what is found in East Africa on average (table 13).

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