Water and Politics in Africa

As my last blog post discussed the political grievances between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan regarding the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), this post will look further into how political cooperation between the Eastern Nile countries may not be as clear cut as first imagined.  In fact, economic cooperation between Ethiopia and Sudan, despite their failure to find common ground on water cooperation has been thriving in the last 10 years (Tawfik, 2019) . With the backdrop of the signing of the Declaration of Principles (DoP) on the GERD in 2015, there was renewed hope among everyone in the 3 Eastern Nile countries that cooperation on not just water, but all other resources rooted in the water sector such as food, energy and trade would be progressive too (Tawfik, 2019). However, is it possible for that to happen when even the fundamental resource that is contained in the other resources, water, is so difficult to come to an agreement on itself?  Rawia Tawfik in her article explains

Continuing from my previous post, this post will look at The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) and how the construction of the dam has caused political clashes between the three countries involved, Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt.  The construction of the GERD first started in 2011, and once completed will be the 5th largest in the world (Wheeler et al, 2020). One of the major benefits the dam will bring is hydropower production, which a country like Ethiopia can greatly benefit from to bring energy and power to its people in urban and rural areas. There have been studies that show that energy consumption directly influences the economic development of many countries (Basheer et al, 2021). So, the GERD would significantly improve the economic development of Ethiopia too. However, the downstream countries of Egypt and Sudan disregard it fearing the dam will drastically affect the amount of water available for millions that completely rely on the Nile for their water sources and that th

The Nile Basin is a transboundary water body system that covers around 10% of African territory and includes 11 African countries. This blog post’s focus is on the politics of transboundary water management in the Nile Basin. The Nile River Basin The various actions that take place within a transboundary watershed as one would expect spreads many benefits and externalities unevenly across the different states and for the people living in these districts (Jägerskog et al., 2007). With that of course there are increased chances of conflicts between the different regions that use the Nile basin. Therefore, it could be argued that the Nile basin needs to be appropriately managed in order to bring benefits to all its users and to reduce the externalities felt by some countries. However, the question that needs to be addressed is who is responsible to manage such a large basin that runs across several borders.  The ideas put forward in the paper by Jägerskog and others discusses the notion