Dear South Sudan,

Almost everything your state spends is paid for by oil that must travel through another country to reach the sea. The World Bank has reported that oil provides about 90 percent of your government’s revenue. In February 2024 the pipeline that carries it through Sudan was damaged in the fighting there, and the shipments stopped. A nation built on one export, through one pipeline, carries all of its risk in one place.

Yet the land is broad and the water plentiful: 2,359 cubic metres of renewable fresh water for each of you, along the White Nile and the great wetlands of the Sudd. The World Bank is financing health systems, a productive safety net, community resilience, women’s economic empowerment, energy access and skills. These are aimed at the right guarantees, and they are the instruments most able to reach households directly.

The work ahead is plain, and it is worth saying plainly. Almost none of you cooks with clean fuel. Eighty-nine in every hundred of you cannot always count on enough good food. Seventy-six in every hundred of you lived below $3.00 a day at the last count, in 2016. Clean energy sets your Coverage today, at 0 out of 100, with food and income close behind. Each of them is within your reach.

The deepest risk is the single source. Each barrel that does reach the sea can be pledged in part to the guarantees that would make the nation less dependent on the next: water at the household, food from the land, power from the sun.

Now imagine that same resolve turned toward every home in the country. Picture Perfect South Sudan: a morning when every family cooks with clean fuel and sits down to a full table; when every tap runs clean and every home has a safe toilet; when every child walks to a school where a teacher is waiting, and reads with ease by the age of ten; when every mother lives within reach of a clinic with the lights on, and every young person finds work that pays. And no South Sudanese falls below a decent life, because the nation has decided that none will.

“Oil has paid for the state. Water, land and people can pay for a decent life.”

So this is an invitation. Bring your vision, your story and your solutions to the Perfect South Sudan Design Studio, and join the Co-designers who are already imagining what comes next. Perfect South Sudan will not be designed for you. It will be designed by you.