Susan E. Greisen

We all need water and, surely, we have all heard plenty about the climate-change debate. However, on my travels abroad this past year, my interest in its impact rose to a new level when I visited two iconic African regions. The first, being the Okavango Delta in Botswana fed by one source called the Cuito River. The terminus of the river’s tentacles branch out like fingers to create Okavango Delta, two countries downsteam, a rich fertile land teeming with wild animals and birds until it ends in the Kalahari Desert.

The second body of water was The Nile River in Egypt. The Nile is a large ribbon of water dividing the Sahara Desert from it’s southern border with Sudan all the way to the Mediterranian Sea in the north. Fertile farmland, bird life, camel caravans, and livestock are common along its banks

What do these two African rivers have in common? They are living and thriving upon, what I call, borrowed water. The water that nourishes these two regions does not always fall from the sky above them. The majority of the rain doesn’t even fall in the country in which they reside. The source of these rivers are far, far away in other countries.

The first map above shows one source of the the Okavango Delta fed by the Cuito River in Angola, two countries north of Botswana. The second map illustrates that the one source of The Nile, the Ethiopian Blue Nile, is two countries to the south of Egypt. Therefore, neither Botswana nor Egypt have any control over the water that benefits their land. In the past when rain and water were plentiful and humans did not overpopulate the regions, this resource was not a concern. During the time of my visit to both countries in 2022-23, the lack of water was a discussion by both of my tour guides.

I need not tell you what will happen to the Okavango Delta and the Nile region when their source of water is diminished.

The demise of this region has only been recently revealed in 2018. Here is a trailer of this discovery in a powerful documentary entitled Into the Okavango. (One would need Disney+ to view it in full. The free download attached to this trailer is not the video and not as good as the one with the subscription.) With the help of this research, there is a commitment with Namibia and Angola to work together with Botswana to help preserve its watershed.

On the other hand, the major concern for Egypt is that Ethiopia has built a large dam called the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Nile’s source (the Blue Nile) which supplies 85% of the water to the Nile in Egypt illustrated in the second map above. This dam harnesses and controls the water for irrigation and hydoelectric power for Ethiopia’s growing population. Learn more by reading this article written by the BBC in September 2023.

At the time of this writing there are no official country treaties or agreements of how to share this valuable resource; only a handshake from Angola with Botswana, and more contentious political issues lie between Egypt and Ethiopia. The clock is ticking for these countries, their people, and their livelihood. Tourism is a main industry for both Botswana and Egypt for which they rely on their precious water resource. Maybe the title of this blog has more meaning; Borrowed Water, Buying Time.

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Addendum: The Colorado River in the US, that feeds water to the arid Baja in Mexico, has a similar story. The 1944 agreement between the US and Mexico was signed, but as populations grow and climate changes, the timeline and outcome for over 40 million people in these two countries who depend on this water, have an uncertain future. Are we/they, merely BUYING TIME?