Support Sudan now or regret later - UN tells International Community

The United Nations has urged the United States to remove Sudan from a list of Nations sponsoring terrorism as it warns that the international community will pay a terrible price for failing to support Sudan.

"The story of Sudan in year 2020 is not the story of the previous government,” United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) administrator Achim Steiner told AFP in an interview during his visit to Sudan this week.

“It is the story in which waiting for too long to actually step in and support this (development) process may have a terrible price.”

Sudan has been facing series of challenges including economic crisis since the protest that led to the ousting of former leader Omar al-Bashir.

Africa News reports that since his ousting, the country's challenges has increased to the point of having foreign debt of $60 billion, inflation of about 60 percent, soaring unemployment and chronic shortage of fuel and foreign currency.

However, Steiner, the first UNDP chief to ever visit the northeast African country, expresses believe that support for the country will help lift it out of its current situation.

“Here is a country in which the youth, and particularly the women, have not only managed to pull off a peaceful revolution in large part, but they actually have an agenda to build a developmental state,” Steiner said.

“The international community must recognise how unusual and how extraordinarily helpful this is in a region that is otherwise providing more and more worrying news about political instability and about extremism.”