Countries in East and Central Africa have agreed to use the waters of the River Nile to generate power but are facing resistance from Sudan and Egypt, who are raising concerns about water security.

Nile Technical Advisory Committee chairperson Fred Mwango told a Nile Basin Initiative meeting held in Dar es Salaam that Egypt and Sudan were still wary of water security due to their countries’ geographic locations.

“Stretching more than 6,600 km from Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean, the Nile is a vital water and energy source for the nine countries through which it flows.

It is important in achieving sustainable socioeconomic development through the equitable utilisation and benefit from the common Nile Basin resources,” Mr Mwango told the meeting.

He said the project, expected to take off by 2035, would help reduce power interruptions that have been adversely affecting the economies of most of the Nile Basin countries.

“The objective is to focus on facilitating the development of regional power markets among the Nile Basin countries including Burundi, DR Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda,” said Mr Mwango.

He challenged the NBI countries to “take bold decisions in addressing the endemic and recurring power problems in the region by embracing a regional approach to planning and exploitation of energy resources.”

Mr Mwango said the key findings of an NBI study showed that member countries stood to achieve significant efficiency gains in power production and create a positive environment for power trade.

“Nile Basin Initiative countries should not be afraid of taking daring decisions in overcoming their power problems. We have been losing out due to the power crisis,” Mr Mwango said.

He cited Ethiopia and the DR Congo as countries capable of generating enough power to be distributed around the region and even exported to Europe.

Less than 20 per cent of the 300 million inhabitants of the NBI countries had access to electricity while in some the figure was as low as 3 per cent.

Annual per-capita electricity consumption in the Basin ranges from 1,800kWh in Egypt to only 20kWh in Burundi, whereas per capita consumption of 500kWh is considered a minimum level by today’s standards.

The NBI executive director, Dr Wael Khairy, said diverse challenges facing the countries included poverty, environmental degradation, low socioeconomic development, high population growth rates, natural disasters like droughts and floods, political instability in parts of the region and inadequate access to basic services including modern power energy.

“The region suffers from a general lack of a conducive environment necessary for rapid socioeconomic transformation of our countries.

Furthermore, todate our developmental efforts are oriented to national planning and development priorities, an approach that does not give us the benefits of collective action,” he said.

Dr Khairy noted that although the Nile Basin was endowed with natural resources of every kind, their distribution was not uniform in time and space.

To address these challenges effectively, it was prudent to devise holistic and strategic regional or basin-wide plans.

“This calls for a concerted basin-wide effort for optimal harnessing and utilisation of the basin’s abundant resources.

The regional and basin-wide approaches will steer us towards maximising benefits from these natural resources.”

Other challenges facing the region were severe power supply uncertainties, with increasing power demand and inability to raise capital for needed generation and transmission lines.

Dr Khairy said reliance on emergency power generation at more than US 12cts/kWh frustrated socioeconomic development efforts, while most potential sites identified were less than US 3cts/kWh in generation cost.

There was a need to co-ordinate power market development under the East African Power Pool (EAPP) with implementation of interconnectors by the NBI.