Collaboration on Nile water management: An introduction

Welcome to my first blog post! Today, we will explore the need for collaboration on water issues in the Nile Basin. Over the next few weeks, this blog will look at the need for collaboration on the Nile, the progress that has been made, and what can be done.

The Nile Basin supports over 200 million lives, in 10 different countries (World Bank 2019), due to historical mistrust and volatile government, cooperation in the region has not always been easy, however, there are benefits to be reaped and issues to be solved. The setting up of the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) in 1999 aimed to “achieve sustainable socioeconomic development through the equitable utilisation of, and benefit from, the common Nile Basin water resources” (Jagerskog 2007), in response to several issues on the Nile that require multilateral solutions. This created a forum for the region's relations, tying countries together and encouraging cooperation.

Nile River Basin map (Nile Basin Initiative 2001)

 

The need for cooperation on the Nile is clear - Ethiopia alone is estimated to lose 1/3 of its growth potential due to hydrological variability (World Bank 2006), and damming could drastically reduce this (Block & Strzepek 2011).

 

Hydrological variability is also an issue further downstream in Egypt and Sudan, both droughts and floods would be better dealt with by coordinated damming from Nile riparians, and water flow improves with the moving of storage to areas with lower evaporation rates through damming (Alan 1994). Multilateral approaches like this aid access through storage and regulation. It is argued that economic, social, and diplomatic externalities come from cooperation on handling Nile water flow, even put forward by former Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi (Tawfik 2016).

 

However, this is rarely seen in the Nile Basin, as due to short-term political visions, the possibilities of public goods are ignored and replaced with lower-risk and more localised, politically favourable goals (Jagerskog 2007). The NBI was built upon in 2010 by the Cooperative Framework Agreement, where upstream states sought more water from the Nile as a part of the effort for collaboration - this was rejected by Egypt and Sudan due to an article threatening their water share guarantees and thus significantly mitigating its potential (NBI 2022).

 

Throughout this term, I will be updating this blog with regular instalments, taking my argument for collaboration and benefit sharing across the Nile Basin; next time, we will look at how benefits can be shared through collaboration.