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The Rift Valley Institute (RVI) is an independent, non-profit research and training organisation working with communities and institutions in Eastern Africa, including Sudan, South Sudan, the Horn of Africa, and the Great Lakes region. Established in 2001, the RVI has offices in Kenya, the US and the UK.
The aim of the Institute is to bring local knowledge to bear on global information systems, advancing education, combating institutional amnesia, and modifying development practice.
The RVI's core activities can be summed up as action-oriented education: field research and the dissemination of knowledge about Eastern Africa, within the region and beyond. The RVI's research projects are designed to record and preserve indigenous culture, support local research capacity, promote human rights and inform global advocacy efforts.
The RVI works with educational institutions across the region and runs several in-country training courses. In the summer of 2012, there were three primary courses, covering Sudan/South Sudan, the Horn of Africa and the Great Lakes. Each featured an intensive, week-long syllabus and was taught by both internationally recognized scholars and local experts. RVI courses emphasise the practical application of academic and technical knowledge to politics and development for local and expatriate aid workers, diplomats, peace-keepers, researchers and business people. An enlarged course schedule for 2013 will be announced in December 2012.
The Institute maintains an expanding open-access digital library, the Sudan Open Archive, available online and on disk, comprising historical and contemporary books, documents and audio-visual media. The RVI's own website features free-to-download digital editions of the Institute's reports and publications, including The Sudan Handbook (2011), an authoritative introduction written by leading Sudanese, South Sudanese and international specialists.
The RVI's Executive Director is Professor John Ryle, who founded the Institute with Jok Madut Jok and Philip Winter. Fellows of the Institute, drawn from the region and beyond, are practitioners and academic specialists in the fields of human rights, history, anthropology, political science, economics, development, media, and law.
The RVI has received financial support from organisations including the Open Society Institute, the J.M. Kaplan Fund, the Sigrid Rausing Trust, the United States Institute of Peace, UNICEF, UNEP, and the UK Government Department for International Development (DFID). It has received donations from Small Voice (UK) and Times Newspapers and technical support from Compactive Digital Services (Budapest) and Halcrow Ltd (London).
The Institute works in collaboration with other organisations in the region and beyond. These include the University of Juba, Sudan, the Southern Sudan Commission for Census, Statistics and Evaluation, the International Rescue Committee, the Bahr-el-Ghazal Youth Association, Save The Children Fund (UK), Bard College (New York), the Royal African Society, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the British Institute in Eastern Africa, Rumbek Senior Secondary School; the Shading Tree; the World Bank; and the Poetry Translation Centre at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
Sudan, officially the Republic of the Sudan, is a country in Northeast Africa. It borders the Central African Republic to the southwest, Chad to the west, Egypt to the north, Eritrea to the northeast, Ethiopia to the southeast, Libya to the northwest, South Sudan to the south, and the Red Sea. It has a population of 45.7 million people as of 2022 and occupies 1,886,068 square kilometres, making it Africa's third-largest country by area and the third-largest by area in the Arab League. It was the largest country by area in Africa and the Arab League until the secession of South Sudan in 2011; since then both titles have been held by Algeria. Its capital city is Khartoum, and its most populous city is Omdurman.
The rich and varied music of Sudan has traditional, rural, northeastern African roots and also shows Arabic, Western or other African influences, especially on the popular urban music from the early 20th century onwards. Since the establishment of big cities like Khartoum as melting pots for people of diverse backgrounds, their cultural heritage and tastes have shaped numerous forms of modern popular music. In the globalized world of today, the creation and consumption of music through satellite TV or on the Internet is a driving force for cultural change in Sudan, popular with local audiences as well as with Sudanese living abroad.
The Addis Ababa Agreement, also known as the Addis Ababa Accord, was a set of compromises within a 1972 treaty that ended the First Sudanese Civil War (1955–1972) fighting in Sudan. The Addis Ababa accords were incorporated in the Constitution of Sudan.
The Second Sudanese Civil War was a conflict from 1983 to 2005 between the central Sudanese government and the Sudan People's Liberation Army. It was largely a continuation of the First Sudanese Civil War of 1955 to 1972. Although it originated in southern Sudan, the civil war spread to the Nuba mountains and the Blue Nile. It lasted for almost 22 years and is one of the longest civil wars on record. The war resulted in the independence of South Sudan 6 years after the war ended.
Slavery in Sudan began in ancient times, and had a resurgence during the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983–2005). During the Trans-Saharan slave trade, many Nilotic peoples from the lower Nile Valley were purchased as slaves and brought to work elsewhere in North Africa and the Orient by Nubians, Egyptians, Berbers and Arabs.
Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im is a Sudanese-born Islamic scholar who lives in the United States and teaches at Emory University. He is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law, associated professor in the Emory College of Arts and Sciences, and Senior Fellow of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion of Emory University.
Sudan University of Science and Technology is one of the largest public universities in Sudan, with ten campuses in Khartoum state. The main campus is located in the so-called Al Mugran area of Khartoum, the confluence of the White Nile and the Blue Nile.
Education in Sudan is free and/or compulsory for children aged 6 to 13 years. Primary education up to the 2019/2020 academic year consists of eight years, followed by three years of secondary education. The primary/secondary educational ladder of 6+3+3 years was switched in 1965 and during the Omar al-Bashir presidency to 8+3 and is scheduled, during the 2019 Sudanese transition to democracy, to return to 6+3+3 in the 2020/2021 academic year. The primary language at all levels is Arabic. Starting in the 2020/2021 academic year, English is to be taught starting at kindergarten. Schools are concentrated in urban areas; many in the South and West were damaged or destroyed by years of civil war. In 2001 the World Bank estimated that primary enrolment was 46 percent of eligible pupils and 21 percent of secondary students. Enrolment varies widely, falling below 20 percent in some provinces. Sudan has 36 government universities and 19 private universities, in which instruction is primarily in Arabic.
University of Gezira, or U of G, is a public university located in Wad Medani, Sudan. It is a member of the Federation of the Universities of the Islamic World.
Gadalla Gubara was a Sudanese cameraman, film producer, director and photographer. Over five decades, he produced more than 50 documentaries and three feature films. He was a pioneer of African cinema, having been a co-founder of both the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers FEPACI and the FESPACO Film festival. His daughter, Sara Gubara, who is a graduate of Cairo Higher Institute of Cinema, Egypt, assisted him with his later film projects, after he had lost his eyesight. She is considered to be Sudan's first female film director.
Education in South Sudan is modelled after the educational system of the Republic of Sudan. Primary education consists of eight years, followed by four years of secondary education, and then four years of university instruction; the 8 + 4 + 4 system, in place since 1990. The primary language at all levels is English, as compared to the Republic of Sudan, where the language of instruction is Arabic. There is a severe shortage of English teachers and English-speaking teachers in the scientific and technical fields.
Concordis International is a non-profit organization that works alongside and in support of official peace processes, where they exist, to improve the potential for lasting peace. The organization has headquarters in London and country-offices in the Central African Republic and in Nouakchott, Mauritania. Concordis' historical roots are in peacebuilding work by the Newick Park Initiative in South Africa (1986–91) and in post-genocide Rwanda (1994-7).
John Rowland Ryle OBE is a British writer, anthropologist, social activist, filmmaker, teacher and publisher, with an interest in the history and culture of Eastern Africa. He is co-founder of the Rift Valley Institute, and Legrand Ramsey Professor of Anthropology at Bard College, New York.
The National Archive of South Sudan is located in Juba, South Sudan. The collection consists of tens of thousands of Sudanese and Southern Sudanese government documents running from the early 1900s, through the independence of Sudan in 1956 and Sudan's First (1955–1972) and Second (1983–2005) civil wars, to the late 1990s. The archives are run by the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports in Juba, South Sudan.
Omnia Shawkat is a Sudanese journalist, digital stories and cross-cultural curator. She is co-founder and manager of the cultural online platform Andariya, based in Sudan, South Sudan and Uganda, covering other countries in East Africa and the Horn of Africa as well.
The Pastoral and Environmental Network in the Horn of Africa (PENHA) is an international non-governmental organisation, founded in 1989 by professionals and development workers from the Horn of Africa to address pastoral and agro-pastoral development from a regional perspective and provide cross-learning at a global level. With headquarters in London, PENHA has established country offices in Ethiopia and Somaliland, with close organisational partnerships in Eritrea, Sudan and Uganda.
Sudan Memory is an online archive and cultural heritage project, provided by an international group of partners with the aim of conserving and promoting Sudanese cultural heritage. In the course of the project, digital reproductions of books and newspapers, photographs and films, visual art and architecture, as well as of other cultural objects in Sudan were created and published on the project's website.
Khalil Farah was a Sudanese singer, composer and poet, who wrote his lyrics both in Sudanese colloquial as well as in Modern Standard Arabic. He is considered as one of the most prominent pioneers of the early 20th century renewal in singing and poetry in Sudan.
The College of Fine and Applied Art in Khartoum is the only public art school in Sudan. Its predecessor was founded by the British administration in 1945 as School of Design in the former Gordon Memorial College. In 1951, it was incorporated into the Khartoum Technical Institute that became the Sudan University of Science and Technology (SUST) in 1971, and the school was renamed College of Fine and Applied Art.
