Water and Politics

  Introduction to writing about Africa ‘Africa’ is often wrongly thought of as a singular entity, particularly among popular culture development discourse. In the West we rarely consider other continents in the homogenous manner that Africa is, even Europe is at least split between East and West. It is crucial to acknowledge the multiplicity of political discourses across a continent with widely different regions. There are nuances within regions themselves. The focus of this blog series will be in East Africa, specifically the Nile Basin and its complex hydro-politics. The Nile is the longest river in the world, with its basin spanning 3,349,000 square kilometres of East Africa. 487.3 million live in 11 countries of the basin. North to South each nation along the river is unique as the climate evolves from the Ethiopian highlands, the grasslands of South Sudan and the deserts of Egypt. The area of the Nile Basin impacted by the GERD ( Source ) Setting the scene in East Africa