To produce, in this time of destruction, must be among our primary objectives. The reality in Sudan has long been defined by war, displacement, malnutrition, and lack of services affecting the majority of the population. This reality worsened dramatically after April 2023, with the outbreak of the latest war, deepening the suffering and expanding the share of the population affected.
At first glance, these atrocities may lead well-intended efforts to focus solely on providing services to the impoverished. This was evident in the communal initiatives, such as emergency rooms and other mutual aid structures, that spread across the country since the war’s early days. While the life-saving role of these efforts and service provision in general cannot be denied, there are compelling arguments for equally prioritizing productive economic activities.
The Survival Imperative
The working people of Sudan have long recognized production as a survival imperative. This is evident among those in conflict zones, the displaced, those suffering from collapsed services, and even those historically excluded from state support. Across regions, small-scale manufacturers, farmers, and service providers adapt to market demands while securing their own livelihoods.
Most of Sudan’s large-scale manufacturing was concentrated in the capital. The war’s outbreak in Khartoum thus created glaring market gaps. In response, micro- and small-scale productive activities emerged to fill these voids; first in dairy production, then agrifood goods, detergents, and beyond.
As food became less available and its prices soared, subsistence farming expanded into homes, neighbourhood squares, and repurposed spaces like schools-turned-shelters. Smallholder farming also grew, fueled by displaced workers and investors relocating to rural areas.
Production is less a matter of convenience than a survival imperative.
When interviewed, these producers consistently cite two motivations: securing family income and meeting observed market needs. Raw materials and skills, though logistical hurdles, are treated as secondary, often acquired through networks, social media, or improvised training. Their choices underscore a stark reality: production is less a matter of convenience than a survival imperative.
Medium-sized productive enterprises have also emerged across Sudan over the past two years. Factories employing 20 or more workers, primarily in agrifood processing and plastic manufacturing, have taken root in cities like Al-Managil, Ad-Damar, and Dongola among others. Yet their numbers remain modest compared to the proliferation of micro- and small-scale producers, underscoring how most participants in productive activities lack access to significant capital.
Meanwhile, groups with greater financial resources have largely diverted investments toward lower-value, complementary sectors, such as import trading or asset leasing, rather than high-value production.
This deprioritization of productive economic activities extends to serval other socio-economic groups, before and during the current war.
For Sudan’s ruling class, consolidating authoritarian control systematically outweighs investment in production. Similarly, international aid systems treat production as secondary to service delivery, often subordinating both to bureaucratic or political agendas.
Communal kitchens save lives, but communal production sustains them.
Mutual aid structures exhibit this tendency to a lesser degree. Their grassroots nature makes decision-makers more responsive to beneficiaries’ demands; particularly the widespread appeal for production tools and raw materials as survival necessities.
Interviews reveal how mutual aid groups frequently reprioritize budgets to fund such requests. In stark contrast, appeals for productive financing to international donors are routinely rejected, reflecting institutional resistance to expanding beyond service provision.
Productive economic activities are not merely survival tools for producers; they can also establish sustainable financing models for service provision, reducing reliance on donations and external aid.
Rather than competing with services, production must be recognized as their essential complement. This requires intentional design: investing available resources in productive ventures while channeling their returns into service financing. Such integrated systems address urgent survival needs while sustaining services, raising incomes, and improving quality of life.
The Developmental Case
For over half a century, successive Sudanese governments have pursued a development model defined by extreme centralization and chronic underinvestment, systematically marginalizing regions beyond the political and economic core. Their rentier economic approaches naturally prioritized extractive industries (oil, mining) while imposing extractive practices on other sectors: promoting water-intensive export crops despite environmental costs, and exporting raw livestock/agrifood products rather than developing domestic processing industries that could generate higher-value jobs and returns.
The consequences are quantifiable. Sudan’s top 10 per cent now controls over 40 per cent of national wealth, while the bottom half shares less than 18 per cent (World Inequality Database, 2023). Yet recent shifts reveal alternatives: workers at a new detergent factory in Ad-Damar, like others in small- and medium-sized enterprises emerging around the country, note such opportunities simply didn’t exist before the last two years. Their testimonies expose how ruling-class strategies not only failed to industrialize and modernize Sudan, but actively suppressed the natural diffusion of industries to peripheral areas through forced centralization.
Prioritizing production as a pathway to development is compelling, yet it requires clear guidelines to ensure communal benefit, not just individual gain. While individual and small-group entrepreneurial efforts can provide decent incomes, they often remain confined to low-tech products due to resource constraints and infrastructural deficits (like unreliable electricity). This limits their revenue, job creation, and technological potential.
Conversely, large-scale pre-war investments, though capable of advancing beyond low-tech production, historically prioritized monopolizing inelastic goods or importing more technologically advanced goods rather than fostering domestic industrialization. Their track record renders them unfit as agents of equitable development.
The solution lies in cooperative models. In the states of Darfur, agricultural emergency rooms have organized smallholder farmers, diversified crops, and bolstered resilience against siege and famine as well as potential sustainability for upcoming seasons, overcoming financial and technical hurdles that hinder individual efforts. Similarly, groups of soap producers in Al-Jazirah and Atbara collectively purchase raw materials to reduce costs. Scaling these scattered cooperative practices into formalized systems such as shared production spaces, coordinated supply chains, and collective ownership, could unlock the transformative potential of Sudan’s micro-, small-, and medium-scale producers.
To maximize impact, these cooperative efforts require well-designed seed funding; one that accounts for the technical and managerial requirements of operating in Sudan’s underdeveloped, conflict-ridden context. Funding must prioritize flexibility and timeliness, especially for rain-fed smallholder farms and other production vulnerable to logistical changes.
Equally critical are governance structures that preserve collective decision-making; without them, even cooperative enterprises risk degenerating into profit-driven ventures mirroring Sudan’s failed elitist models, monopolistic, low-value, and exclusionary.
The path forward lies in pairing communal production with communal financing. Established models like credit unions or innovative local systems (such as organized micro-donations to sustain services) demonstrate how pooled resources can create predictable funding streams.
By adapting such approaches, Sudan’s working people can channel their limited resources toward high-impact economic opportunities. If appropriately organized and scaled, communal financing can even enable wider cooperative activity to own and operate large scale manufacturing.
Ultimately, collective organization, of labour and capital, remains key to unlocking production’s full developmental potential.
The Political Necessity
The revolutionary political project of freedom, peace, and justice for Sudan requires not only equitable distribution of wealth through services, development, and prosperity, but equally equitable systems for generating that wealth.
Continuing on a path of limited industrialization while prioritizing extractive resources and practices may produce substantial revenues, as seen in Sudan’s massive annual gold production, yet these figures translate into no meaningful improvement in people’s lives.
While a fairer distribution of gold revenues could theoretically benefit Sudanese citizens, this potential is routinely undermined by the systemic injustices inherent in its extraction.
A telling example emerged from a 2021 conference at the Ministry of Energy and Mining, which brought together officials, producers, and community representatives from mining areas in South Kordofan. There, a representative from Talodi locality’s Resistance Committees made a striking declaration: the community wanted neither increased social responsibility percentages from gold mining companies nor even community ownership of the mines. Due to severe environmental damage and health consequences, they demanded a complete cessation of all mining activities.
Whether these community claims are fully verifiable becomes irrelevant when extractive industries continue dominating Sudan’s economy. This pattern repeats across the nation: communities endure the devastating consequences of lucrative oil operations that destroy pastures, or large-scale agricultural projects that deplete water resources vital to surrounding small farms.
The fundamental political reality remains clear: without moving beyond these exploitative economic models, any project for justice will remain constrained by the very resources it depends upon for funding.
Prioritizing productive economic activities is essential for developing a political project of justice that is realistic, serious, and true to its core values. Such a focus ensures political efforts remain grounded in issues vital to public survival; as any meaningful political project must be.
The critical questions of production priorities, labour organization, and financing options previously discussed are inherently political in nature. After all, the fundamental goal of extending development and prosperity to all Sudanese people, rather than just the elite, is itself a political imperative. Revolutionary political movements must therefore engage actively and deliberately with these economic discussions.
Just as a revolutionary project needs production-focused policies to establish equitable and sustainable economic systems, this model of production is equally vital for advancing revolutionary objectives.
Collectively organized productive activities create the foundation for more democratic governance structures. Unlike extractive or elitist production models, which typically minimize permanent employment through temporary labour and precarious work arrangements, value-added productive activities, especially when cooperatively governed and geographically distributed, inherently require larger numbers of stable workers.
This dynamic makes revenues and services (whether state-provided or otherwise) dependent on a much broader labour base, rather than being tied to profits controlled by a handful of exporters, extractors, and monopolies.
The recent statement by Sudan’s Finance Minister in which he defended continued gold exports to the UAE despite diplomatic tensions by citing the need to “protect investments“; provides a telling example of how state priorities align with dominant revenue sources, even when they contradict official positions. This demonstrates why increasing value-added production and expanding cooperative labour structures is crucial: it systematically enhances the political influence of working people, creating countervailing power against extractive economic interests.
Equally crucial is how productive economic activities create foundational structures for effective popular organizing. When groups share material conditions and interests through collective production, they gain the means to wield their unified power, directing political will toward their priorities. No better example of the power of organized labour can be cited these days than the May 2019 strike in Sudan in demand of a fully civilian government, the anniversary of which we are approaching in the coming days.
Neither just production nor genuine political change can be fully realized without the other—this interdependence defines the path toward justice in Sudan.
The symbiotic relationship between revolutionary political progress and communally organized production is undeniable. Each becomes the necessary condition for the other’s advancement: just production systems require political transformation to flourish, while genuine political change depends on economic foundations that empower working people. Neither can be fully realized without the other, this interdependence defines the path toward justice in Sudan.
This article’s arguments: survivalist, developmental, and political, all stress two essential truths.
First, we must invest our energy and resources in productive economic activities. Second, these activities must be designed to serve our revolutionary goals of justice and prosperity for all.
Accordingly, we need production that:
- Responds to community needs while supporting social service provision,
- Responsibly employs available workforce and assets, and
- Embraces cooperative principles to enable technological growth and scaling.
Such approaches can unlock the full developmental and communal benefits of communally organized production. This vision will never appeal to large investors or international donors. Their interests lie in restricting Sudan’s development, political power, and freedom, while maximizing control over our resources and profits.
Only one force can advance this vision: The productive people of Sudan themselves, those suffering underdevelopment, impoverishment and economic and physical violence, and the political project that truly prioritizes their interests.
