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Good practice Imported

MANSAM-SORD Women's Political Candidate Identification & Training Initiative

Sudan · Khartoum · See the Sudan profile

Evidence: Descriptive / self-reported Top 55% 63/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Sudan's 2019 transition set a 40% women's quota for its planned legislative council. MANSAM and SORD identified 1,070 potential women candidates in 110 locations in six weeks - but the council was never seated before the 2021 coup and 2023 civil war.

1070 people
Women identified as willing electoral candidates (early 2020)
17 of Sudan's states
States covered by the identification exercise
<25%
Women's share of announced transitional cabinet posts (September 2019)
MANSAM-SORD Women's Political Candidate Identification & Training Initiative

Details

Maturity
Discontinued
Promoter
UNDP Sudan, MANSAM (Women of Sudanese Civic and Political Groups) & SORD
Period
2019-2021
Keywords
political participation, civic leadership, transitional governance

Context

After Sudan's 2019 revolution mandated a 40% women's quota for the 300-seat Transitional Legislative Council, MANSAM (Women of Sudanese Civic and Political Groups) and SORD, with UNDP core funding, ran a six-week identification and training exercise in early 2020, sending 11 teams to 110 cities, villages and displaced-persons camps across 17 states.

Results

The exercise identified 1,070 women willing to stand for office, two-thirds aged 40 or younger; participants cited discriminatory social norms (32%) and patriarchal systems (14%) as the main barriers to running. Women held under 25% of transitional cabinet posts when announced in September 2019.

Conclusions

The Transitional Legislative Council itself was never seated: repeated delays gave way to the October 2021 military coup, and the process collapsed with the outbreak of civil war in April 2023, so the 40% quota was never tested against real seats. This is documented here as an honest case of high-quality preparatory work whose political goal was overtaken by events outside its control — identification and training pipelines cannot by themselves guarantee institutional follow-through in a collapsing transition.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Low (< €50k)
Time to results
Short (< 1 year)
Staffing & skills
11 field teams (MANSAM/SORD), UNDP core funding and coordination

Conditions for success

  • Sustained civil-society lobbying that secured the quota in the first place
  • Geographically broad outreach (110 locations across 17 states)

Common failure modes

  • A legal quota alone does not guarantee seated institutions if the wider political transition collapses
  • No enforcement mechanism existed to convert candidate identification into actual seats once the transitional process stalled

Commonly funded by

Philanthropic / foundation funding

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

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