Hydropolitics

Hello, and welcome back to my blog. This week I will be looking at the Aswan Dam, and how colonial treaties have favoured Egypt, leaving other riparian states with little say over the management of the Nile's resources. The unreliability of the River Nile’s flow has been recorded for thousands of years. The Ancient Egyptian civilization grew up along its banks and was very aware of the reliance on the river for its survival. As one of the most developed and populated regions of the Nile, Egypt has historically been the major user of Nile waters which provided fertile soil for the ever-increasing land taken up for agriculture. As colonies became separate countries, populations grew along with the demand for food. The demand for water by not just Egypt, but many of the Niles’ riparian states increased and became a contentious political platform. Poor economic development in many of these states and a lack of investment in programs to increase efficiency in water allocation le...

“Whenever the water supply is good and the land fertile, there we must place colonists without worrying about previous owners. We must distribute the lands full title to the colonists” French governor of Algeria, General Bugeaud (Kimenyi and Mbaku, 2015) . Hello, and welcome back to my blog! This week I want to look back into the colonial past of water management in Africa, to bring to light the history underlying current issues of inequitable governance of the Niles shared resources. Colonial Africa 1912 (World Bank Development Report, 2009) The map above highlights the spread of European colonial rule throughout Africa in the 1900s . The Niles riparian states were for the most part under British rule, having a significant impact on the management of water resources. During this period, two regimes impacted the allocation of water during the post-independence period: 1)     Colonialists used their superior military and police power to bring together vari...

Hello everyone! Welcome back to my blog. My last post covered the specific case of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam and highlighted the political tensions this sparked with upstream countries-mainly Egypt, due to an ongoing historical and cultural debate on who has the rights to the Nile’s waters. I hope to go into the historical debate surrounding colonial and post-colonial legacies to the allocation of the Nile’s resources in the next few blog posts; however this post will look specifically at an initiative set up to target such issues and find solutions and compromises that provide equity to all riparian countries on the Nile. Nile Basin Initiative The Nile Basin Initiative is an international treaty set up to improve the collaborative efforts amongst the Blue Nile’s riparian states in managing the use and development of the Nile’s waters. The initiative was set up in 1999, and was signed by 10 Nile Basin countries namely; Burundi, DR Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda,...

Hello! In the next few blog posts I will be looking at the Nile, maintaining my focus on transboundary water management.  The Nile river is a key example of a transboundary water source. It is an international river shared by 11 riparian countries, and acts as the primary water source for downstream regions; Egypt and Sudan (Ahmed and Elsanabary, 2015). In the past, Egypt has dominated control over the Nile, claiming that 2/3 of the flow is theirs based on a treaty signed with Sudan in 1959 (The Economist, 2016) . However, in the last decade the population of Ethiopia overtook that of Egypt; 240 million vs 130 million respectively. This has resulted in Ethiopia’s desire to manage this water source not only to fight poverty but also to support and improve solidarity, as well as provide sustainable economic development for themselves and neighbouring regions.  Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERC) GERC (Al Ahram Weekly, 2018) The Grand Ethiopia...