Customized Training for Eastern Nile River Basin Professionals, May 2021
Nile Basin modelers participated in a six-day class on the RiverWare software and its application to the Nile Basin RiverWare Model provided by CADSWES and Oxford University. The training, held May 18–26, 2021, was delivered via Zoom to about 25 technical personnel from universities and government agencies in Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia. The purpose of the training was to build capacity for a greater number of regional technical experts to capitalize on preexisting RiverWare models developed by Dr. Kevin Wheeler of Oxford University and other modeling efforts by the national agencies to further develop and refine models that enable planning and operations for sustainable management of the Eastern Nile River Basin.
The training was provided by David Neumann, Mitch Clement and Edith Zagona of CADSWES; and Kevin Wheeler of Oxford. It was coordinated on the African side by Professor Gamal Abdo of University of Khartoum, Sudan; Professor Aly N. El-Bahrawy of Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt; and Professor Yilma Seleshi of Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. The training was funded by the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ), the German government organization dedicated to achieving sustainable development worldwide.
Management of the Eastern Nile River is currently the subject of intense negotiation due to the imminent filling of the new Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), constructed by Ethiopia on the border with Sudan. The main purpose of the GERD is to generate hydropower, but it will hold back for storage water that has in the past freely flowed downstream for use by Sudan and Egypt. Details of the projects and issues surrounding the filling and need for transboundary agreements are described in the recent Nature Communications article CADSWES, in developing the RiverWare suite of decision support tools, advocates and enables decision making through collaboration and sharing of data, models and analysis tools.