Tripartite talks on Nile water management issues ended on Saturday in Sharm El-Sheikh on an upbeat note, writes Gamal Nkrumah Talks between the water ministers of Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh strengthened the budding relationship between the three eastern Nile Basin countries. The Blue Nile, known as the Abbai, is 1,530 kilometres long and was the focus of the Sharm El-Sheikh talks. In previous meetings negotiators were deeply suspicious of each other's motives. At the Sharm El-Sheikh meeting, the three eastern Nile Basin nations started to listen attentively to each other's suggestions. The talks were characterised by openness and trust. The onus was on facilitating development projects on a wide range of technical, economic and financial matters -- not all necessarily exclusively revolving around Nile water management. The Sharm El-Sheikh meeting focussed on both so-called "soft" projects such as capacity building, confidence building and policy development and on "hard" projects such as the development of infrastructure, river management, flood protection, watershed restitution and hydro-electric power generation. Egypt's minister of water resources and irrigation, Mahmoud Abu Zeid, was in an exceptionally buoyant mood. The long-term development and management of Nile waters help improve and strengthen the trust between the Nile Basin countries, he emphasised. The identification of key projects and fund- raising opportunities dominated discussions. Abu Zeid stressed that the talks and the projects reviewed fell within the domain of the Nile Council of Ministers (Nile-COM), the highest decision-making body of the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI). He also pointed out the importance of the International Consortium for Cooperation on the Nile (ICCON) and the Nile Technical Advisory Committee (Nile-TEC), two other NBI agencies, representatives of whom participated at the Sharm El-Sheikh talks. The participation of donor agencies, academicians, other technical experts and professionals, representatives of civil society organisations, the media, and the private sector was deemed essential for the success of the Sharm El-Sheikh meeting. Abu Zeid said that he expected donor agencies, including United Nations-affiliated organisations, such as the UN Development Programme, and international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, make additional funds available for the realisation of the NBI projects. The minister also said that he hoped to see an increase in investments by African regional financial institutions and the private sector in both Western and African countries. Shiseraw Jarso, Ethiopia's minister of water told Al-Ahram Weekly, "We tackled a wide variety of topics including economic and social development concerns, rapid population growth, environmental degradation and cooperative development of the Nile's resources. We identified joint investment opportunities." "The Sharm El-Sheikh talks opened up new opportunities for realising win-win solutions," the Ethiopian minister stressed. Jarso also hotly denied any Israeli connection in Ethiopian Nile development projects. The issue of Israeli involvement in irrigation and hydro-electric power schemes in Ethiopia and other upper riparian Nile Basin nations must be laid to rest, Jarso said. "These are the most fruitful talks so far between the three eastern Nile Basin countries," Ethiopia's Ambassador to Egypt Girma Amare, who attended the Sharm El-Sheikh talks, told the Weekly. "The focus was on the implementation of a number of small scale projects that are considered relatively easy to implement," the Ethiopian ambassador said. "Big projects take time. But the projects we agreed upon will take some two to three years to implement. Work on these small-scale projects will begin immediately." The Nile River is 6,700 kilometres long and its basin encompasses a wide variety of ecologically diverse ecosystems, including: mountains, equatorial forests, swamps and wetlands, savannas and deserts. However, extreme poverty and in some instances poor and undemocratic governance compound the region's many problems. Huge swathes of the region have been ravaged by conflict. Economic ruin, political instability and social devastation as a result of prolonged wars have reduced the population to penury and hunger. Egypt, by far the most prosperous and relatively well-developed country in the Nile Basin, had a per capita income of $1,290 a year in 1998. Kenya, the second most developed economy in the region, and Ethiopia, one of the poorest, had per capita incomes of $350 and $100 respectively in 1998. The economies of the region are clearly at different levels of development. For example, the contribution of agriculture to GDP in Ethiopia is 50 per cent. While the respective figures for Kenya and Egypt are 26 per cent and 17 per cent. The NBI is a regional intergovernmental body that includes ten Nile Basin nations -- Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda. Some of these countries are among the world's poorest and least developed. The NBI includes two subsidiary action groups: the Eastern Nile (EN-SAP) and the Nile Equatorial Lakes region (NEL-SAP). There is an abundance of water in equatorial Africa, in the countries of the NEL-SAP. However, the scarcity of water in the Horn of Africa and North Africa, the EN-SAP group, is a crippling problem. The loss of life and livestock is a terrible threat. A complicating factor is conflict in the region. Armed conflict and violence are widespread in Sudan, Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In Rwanda and Sudan, where military expenditure exceeds 50 per cent of GDP, there are pitifully few funds left for development. A healthy interaction between Nile Basin countries in water resource management, trade, economic and cultural matters is vital for securing foreign funds and bringing stability to the region. Improving prospects for economic development and trade, including constructing better infrastructure facilities, will create an enabling environment for investment. The Sharm El-Sheikh meeting comes under the auspices of the NBI, launched in February 1999. The NBI itself, however, is one of New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD)'s flagship projects. NEPAD is the African Union's blueprint for economic development in the age of globalisation. The ministers at the meeting in Sharm El- Sheikh also expressed an interest in Arab investment. The ministers plan to visit a number of oil-rich Arabian Gulf countries in a concerted bid to raise additional funds for the Nile Basin projects.
