Water and Politics in Africa

Welcome to my last post! Throughout this blog, I have tried to understand the hydropolitical challenges of the Nile basin, especially linked with the GERD. There is a lot that I wasn’t able to cover, and this is what I will turn to in this last post. One very interesting aspect that I couldn’t explore in more detail is the populations’ perceptions of the issue and how public reaction affects decision making in government. In Egypt for example, the strongly anchored belief that the GERD presents a mortal threat to the country means that every concession the government makes to Ethiopia further damages people’s trust in them. Wheeler et al. (2020) add a contribution from behavioural economics to argue that people feel losses stronger than gains, and that this skewed perception could have very negative impacts. Indeed, social media means that a ‘water panic’ in Egypt could spread very quickly and create a very unstable situation in the country. Furthermore, local and internal politics is

  Hi everyone! Now that the GERD has become an undeniable fact and the filling has started, I would like to focus on what Egypt can do to ensure it has enough freshwater resources for the years to come. Indeed, while the GERD might cause water losses during the filling or drought periods, and a loss of power generation at the HAD, Egypt will also suffer from the combined impacts of climate change and population growth. All of these will accentuate the pressure on water resources, and a long-term strategy is needed in order to face these threats. Around 85% of water consumption in Egypt goes towards agriculture. Water access is therefore heavily linked to food production. There are three main ways for Egypt to increase the efficiency of its agricultural systems. The first one is to change crops and crop patterns. For example, rice is very water intensive, and replacing it with less intensive crops could save up to 1 bcm annually . Crop rotation is also crucial to maintain soil fert