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Proceedings of the Conference on the State and Future of Higher Education in
Sudan, edited by Mohamed El Amin A. El Tom. Cairo, Egypt: Association of Sudanese Academics, 1999. (Arabic and English) 630 pages. (Cloth) ISBN 977-5578-06-4.
Towards a Framework for Attainable Health Policies for Sudan: Workshop
Proceedings. Cairo, Egypt: Group for Alternative Policies for Sudan, Office of African Studies, The American University in Cairo, 1999. (Arabic and English) 137 pages. (Paper)
The Group for Alternative Policies for Sudan (GAPS) was formed in 1996 by Sudanese professionals and academics in the Sudan and abroad in order to draw up frameworks for social and economic policies that could replace the programs instituted by the government that seized power in 1989. GAPS, temporarily headquartered at the American University in Cairo and coordinated by economist Ibrahim
Elnur, created wide‑ranging networks of concerned professionals who began to examine the core issues related to social services, agriculture, industry, and infrastructure. Scholars and practitioners collected data, started to draft sectoral analyses, and began to devise alternative
macro-economic policies. These analyses have or will be critiqued and refined in workshops held in the Sudan and abroad.
The first conference, held in Cairo in August 1998 in conjunction with the Association of Sudanese Academics, brought together more than a hundred professors to critique the current situation of higher education and to propose alternative policies. Twenty of the papers as well as the recommendations were published in the
Proceedings. These include detailed studies of the process of Arabization and
Islamization; the negative impact on quality of the proliferation of universities; the overproduction of
ill-trained graduates, which the economy cannot absorb; changes in criteria for admissions that result
inter alia in the admission of academically unqualified students so long as they can pay the fees in hard currency; gender stereotyping in the educational system; and the political, social, and economic causes of the intellectual brain drain in the 1990s. Since only eleven participants came directly from the Sudan and only two of their papers were published in the
Proceedings, the papers and recommendations primarily reflect the perspectives of exiles. Nonetheless, the
Proceedings is a unique collection, whose farsighted recommendations will need to be considered seriously.
The second publication is the proceedings of a workshop on health policies, held in Cairo in March 1999 and organized by Dr. Magda M. A. Ali.
Towards a Framework for Attainable Health Policies represents the culmination of intensive efforts to collect
country-wide statistics and conduct case studies by doctors and health practitioners inside the Sudan. The unsigned essays reflect intimate knowledge of current health indicators, health service delivery, and the situation facing pharmacies and the pharmaceutical industry. Case studies on the deterioration of services in the Khartoum Teaching Hospital and in a rural area near Wadi Halfa illuminate the deleterious impact of the
governments withdrawal from financing the health system. The dismantling of the Occupational Health Department illustrates the politically‑motivated destruction of a valuable program. The Workshop Proceedings also include brief reports from Sudanese doctors who visited the south and Wadi Halfa as well as the executive summary of the WHO/UNICEF joint assessment mission to Bahr
El-Ghazal in June 1998. The workshop participants offer concrete suggestions for the improvement of health care, some of which could be implemented under the existing political system, while others must await possible political changes in the future. The
Workshop Proceedings were disseminated within the Sudan as well as abroad and serve as the basis for an ongoing dialogue on health care issues.
Critical analysis and longterm policy changes are the focus of GAPS’s workshops and publications. Its coordinators are to be commended for undertaking these efforts, despite the difficult research conditions. Future publications on specific economic sectors and
macro-economic policy should prove vital to Sudanese planners and informative to external observers.
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