Giving a Dam in Ethiopia

Speaking at a White House press conference on 20 January 2026, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, claimed that the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) was funded by Washington. Online, Ethiopians responded to President Trump’s reckless assertions with sharp backlash; on Facebook, for instance, they defended the dam’s funding and financing, arguing it was through their domestic contributions. Clearly, President Trump had struck a nerve by downplaying an infrastructural project that symbolized national unity and social cohesion among the Ethiopian people. His brazen statement undermined 14 years of collective monetary contributions from students, consistent salary cuts of civil servants, diaspora fundraising events and public rallies all geared towards mobilizing domestic funds for the GERD.

The significance of relying on domestic financial instruments was explicitly heralded by mainstream news outlets after the dam’s inauguration in September 2025. Set to host the 32nd edition of the Conference of Parties (COP) in November 2027, Addis Ababa has gained an opportunity to showcase the dam as a model of the country’s green energy innovations, alongside other landmark projects such as the Green Legacy Initiative, focusing on ecological restoration and reforestation.

One year after the project’s inauguration, public and private sector leaders across Africa are seriously thinking about domestically funding and financing infrastructural projects, due to the sharp decline in external financing and the desire to avoid foreign debt burdens. The African Union’s decision to theme 2026 as the year of water availability and sustainability makes this an appropriate moment to review whether the GERD can offer an effective potential model for domestic financing and self-sufficiency in water projects in other African nations.

WATER WARS, IDENTITY AND DEVELOPMENTALISM

The GERD is Africa’s largest hydroelectric power plant, with an installed generation capacity of 5.15 gigawatts of power. Built on the Blue Nile tributary of the famed Nile River, the dam hopes to ease energy access to approximately 45 per cent of the Ethiopian population and generate foreign revenue through electricity sales to neighbouring countries. The Nile crosses eleven riparian states, with the upper riparian states comprising Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), South Sudan and Eritrea, and the lower states comprising Egypt and Sudan.

Understanding the GERD requires a deep dive into the water cosmologies of the Ethiopian people and recent history of geopolitical tensions between Ethiopia and Egypt in their struggle for rights over the Nile. The battle for the Nile is rooted in colonial legacies and interferences. As the former colonial power of Egypt and Sudan, Britain sought to control the Nile to ease its colonial administration since its colonies in the region had arid climates. They achieved this by securing riparian agreements on behalf of Egypt and Sudan. Britain orchestrated about seven colonial agreements to prevent the other parties from jeopardizing its control over the Nile, deploying strategies such as excluding Ethiopia from certain agreements or enshrining legal backing for Egypt’s ability to establish dam infrastructure. With each agreement, Egypt’s dominant interest in monopolizing the river and its denial of Ethiopia’s sovereign rights to access the Nile became more visible.

From the late 1950s, newly independent nations took over from Britian in signing agreements on the Nile. They focused on providing full utilization of the river and establishing potential dams, starting with the 1959 agreement between Egypt and the newly independent Sudan. However, over the years, the exclusion of other riparian nations from the agreement encouraged reactions from the exempted nations towards Egypt’s domination of the Nile. This produced the 1999 Nile Basin Initiative and, much later, the 2010 Cooperative Framework Agreement, which sought to provide equal distribution and utilization of the river for each nation. Apart from the need to reverse the exclusion of upper riparian states from water usage, efforts to establish the GERD were motivated by a range of socio-economic, national and religious factors. According to Dr Mekdelawit Deribe, a researcher of water sciences and visiting assistant professor at the University of Connecticut, ‘despite being nicknamed as the water tower of Africa, Ethiopia still had famines every seven years. We did not have food and water security, and energy access was less than 50 per cent.’ Despite such pressing socio-economic concerns, national identity factors often took precedence in motivating the GERD’s establishment...

Subscribe to our free newsletter

You're in — welcome to The Republic

Complete your onboarding

Read

Connect

Apps

More

Read

Connect

Apps

More

Giving a Dam in Ethiopia

WATER WARS, IDENTITY AND DEVELOPMENTALISM

You’ve Reached Your Limit of Free Reading.

Ad-Free Reading Experience

Unlimited Access to Exclusive Archives

In-Depth Deep-Dive Reporting

You’ve Reached Your Limit of Free Reading.

Ad-Free Reading Experience

Unlimited Access to Exclusive Archives

In-Depth Deep-Dive Reporting

Comments

SHOP THE REPUBLIC

Related Stories

Cat Matlala and the Rise of a Grootman

Africa’s Newest Petro-Dynasty

The (Mis)Invention of Central Africa

Waiting for Light in N’Djamena

Nigeria in the World