Sharing benefits on the Nile?

Hi, today we will be looking at collaboration on the Nile and how a benefit-sharing framework can be applied to a recent project and used going forward.

 

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) is an Ethiopian project on the Nile that has transboundary impacts but has been carried out unilaterally, ignoring downstream considerations (Berga et al 2017).

 

What do I mean by this? Egypt has traditionally been the authority on water usage in the basin. The dam, therefore represents Ethiopia and upstream nations asserting their own agency over the water (Nasr and Neef 2016).

 

This introduces the question that confronts cooperation over the Nile water supply; water security or benefit sharing? The Nile Basin Initiative brought about unprecedented stability in the region, however, the CFA threatened the status quo, as Egypt and Sudan rejected calls for a benefit-sharing framework, questioning the impacts on their water security (Zeleke 2011). The issue is a status quo of mistrust, where increasingly vulnerable Egypt and Sudan block the transition to an effective cooperative framework put forward by the developing upstream (Muluye 2021).


President Sisi meets with Sudanese counterpart Omar al-Bashir in Cairo - press photo
Sudan's Bashir and Egypt's Sisi met in 2018 to reaffirm their position on the GERD (EgyptToday 2018)


Studies have proven that the GERD will improve the use of the dam at Aswan (Egypt) and that threats can be near-eliminated through collaboration (Wheeler et al 2015). Therefore, Egypt's priority should be to find shared benefits in the forms of cooperation and sustainable development from the GERD, instead of the short-term goal of purely guaranteeing security (Muluye 2021). 


We see a planning process from Ethiopia riddled with self-interest, that ignored the downstream impacts and voices of affected nations. However, the benefit for the Ethiopian people, with half of Ethiopians lacking access to electricity, furthermore potential for transboundary cooperation in hydroelectricity is enormous (Flaherty 2020). The opportunity for cooperation over water storage, electricity generation, and ecological impacts was not maximised. An all-encompassing adoption of the CFA could have brought diverse and large benefits. In my next blog, I will delve further into the literature on the GERD. 

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