At Stake with River Basin Development in Eastern Africa

Abstract

River basin development in Africa has nearly unparalleled significance for the future of entire nations. Most major hydrodam projects undertaken in the continent have produced intense controversy, particularly over their socioeconomic and environmental impacts. In eastern Africa, river basin development is producing a major humanitarian and human rights crisis for a half million indigenous people in the border region of Ethiopia, Kenya and South Sudan. This crisis stems from developments in the Omo River basin of southwestern Ethiopia, with major international support. Construction of the Gibe III hydrodam—one of the world’s tallest—is primarily geared to the production of hydroelectricity for the benefit of commercial and financial interests within Ethiopia and energy export throughout eastern Africa, as well as to major irrigated commercial agricultural development along the Omo River. The crisis at hand is an international one, especially since the Omo River is a transboundary watercourse—flowing from the Ethiopian highlands to its terminus within Kenya at that nation’s Lake Turkana, where it provides most of the lake’s water. The combined hydrodam and large-scale irrigation agriculture development would cause radical reduction of both river flow volume and lake level—thus destroying pastoral, agropastoral and fishing livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of indigenous people dependent on these waters. Catastrophic level collapse of survival systems in the region would usher in major new inter-ethnic, cross-border armed conflict as communities are forced to fight over the region’s vanishing resources. Major human rights violations involving national governments and key international aid agencies are already underway.