Egypt has locked horns with Ethiopia over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) that Ethiopia is building on the Blue Nile river. The drive for Ethiopia to build the dam is a desire to harness its potential hydropower and lift its people out of poverty.
The sources of the Nile River are the Blue Nile and the White Nile. The Blue Nile, which constitutes over four-fifths of the volume of the Nile waters, originates in the Ethiopian highlands. The White Nile traverses through Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan before it meets with the Blue Nile in Sudan and flows into Egypt with a unified name: The Nile. The Nile eventually empties into the Mediterranean Sea.
The conflict between Egypt and Ethiopia has its roots in a 1929 agreement between Egypt and Great Britain regarding the usage of the waters of the Nile River. Great Britain, as the colonial master of Sudan and the other Nile Basin countries, signed the agreement with Egypt. Ethiopia, a nation that has never been colonised, had neither representation nor a say in the agreement that denied it any right to the river.
Read full article at Addis Fortune
