Water and Politics

Construction work on the GERD ( Source ) The question must be asked... why are dams such a popular modernisation intervention in Africa? Alongside the GERD, there has been a resurgence of dam construction across the African continent . Dams were popular development solution throughout the 20th Century, bringing the African continent to have the world's largest capacity of large dams. In today's environmental discourse, there is a now a renewed interest from the World Bank to  expand lending for hydropower projects , seeing dams as a balance between low-carbon technology and meeting development needs around energy. It is the particular belief from development agencies that energy is central to countries development needs with hydropower percieved to have considerable potential of providing clean, cheap, and most importantly, dependable electricity to hundreds of millions of people who do not yet have it.  60 million Ethiopians alone lack direct access to electricity , which is...

  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 Afri...