Introduction: Water and Politics of the Nile Basin

Welcome to my blog on the politics of water access within Africa. In this introductory post I will reflect on the current access to water and introduce my specific case study that I will expand on in further blogs. I am focusing on the overlap of politics and water because in Africa one of the main problems lies in the management of water sources, combined with declining per capita freshwater sources (Oyebande, 2001).

With Africa being the second largest continent, there are large variations in rainfall continentally. Most of the rain that Africa receives is within the tropics, however the unpredictable and changing trends in precipitation events, means that attaining water security is becoming more difficult. There also lies difficulty in capturing the rainfall from these events and then managing and storing it so that there is access to safe and potable water. On a continental scale only 15% of Africa’s population have access to safely managed drinking water and 82% of people don’t have access to safe sanitation services (MacAlister et al., 2023).

Often in writings about Africa there is a western outlook that misrepresents the continent and fails to recognise the diversity of both the physical and cultural landscape. Africa can often be depicted as one country, instead of taking the time to recognise and understand the uniqueness of each country. Thinking of this whilst writing my blog I will make sure to not make any generalisations about Africa. I will also be conscious of the outside perspective I have in this blog, writing as someone who has never visited the area I am focusing on, and who is relying on research conducted by others (Wainaina, 2005).

 

Figure one

During this blog series I will be focusing on the Nile basin as it is a source of many water conflicts in eastern Africa. The Nile flows over 4,100 miles from Lake Victoria, which is in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, and eventually empties into the mediterranean sea from Egypt (National Geographic Society, 2023). Figure one shows on a map where the river flows. The basin is shared by 11 countries, with roughly 300 million people relying on its water for both domestic and agricultural purposes (Barnes, 2017). Due to the amount of countries this river flows through it creates many transboundary water conflicts, meaning that the future of the basin is not only affected by climate change but by the policies that are formed, on usage of the basin. I will look at ongoing and past projects within the Nile basin, to analyse how political actors have handled conflicts. Additionally i'll look at the barriers to collaboration between countries on the management of the basin, and how this could impact the future use of the basin. The next blog will provide the geographical context to the region because the river spans over varying climates. This information will be beneficial in understanding why and how political issues arise over the management of the basin.