Africa: Other Projects / Articles

Bui Dam, now being built in Ghana with financial backing from China Exim Bank, is described by the project environmental assessment as having "minor" greenhouse gas impacts. In reality, it could end up becoming a major emitter of greenhouse gases, many times worse than a natural gas plant of a similar size.

Controversy over proposed construction of Bui hydropower Dam deepens

Over the millennia, life in Southern Africa was measured by the ebb and flow of the great Zambezi River. Every year the river’s waters spilled over into its vast floodplains, irrigating subsistence crops, rejuvenating vital grasslands for wildlife and livestock, depositing nutrient–rich sediments in coastal mangroves, and triggering the lifecycles of countless species of plants and animals.

World Rivers Review: Volume 13, Number 1

This past September, an official think-tank called Le Groupe de Réflexion Stratég ique (Strategic Planning Group) publicly released a report critical of the large dam projects in the Senegal River Valley. The group's report prompted a local farmers' group to demand the re-establishment of natural river flooding upon which their agricultural systems depend and which the dams had effectively ended.

World Rivers Review: Volume 12, Number 5

The Manantali Dam in Africa's Senegal River Valley is a "poster child" of bad dams. When it was built in the 1980s, it put an end to 1,000 years of successful flood-recession farming; created major economic impacts for downstream farmers, fishers and herders; harmed fisheries, ground water resources and riverine forests, and turned an area with a low incidence of water-borne disease into one of the worst-infected in Africa. Besides all the problems it caused, it also failed to provide promised benefits. The conversion from flood-recession farming (i.e., the cultivation of riverbank areas enriched by silt from retreating annual floods) to irrigated agriculture has been much slower and costlier than expected. In addition, irrigated agriculture has actually been less productive than flood-recession f arming, and contributes to water-borne diseases via irrigation canals and water-storage areas. The project has yet to produce any power, and navigation benefits have been virtually nil.

The Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River is one of Africa’s largest dams, and one with a particularly sorry legacy for those forced to make way for it. Just miles from the huge reservoir in the Zambezi Valley live several tribes who are among the poorest, most remote and least developed in the country. Their predicament is largely attributed to their forced removal from their riverside communities in the late 1950s for the construction of Kariba. For almost 50 years, they have lived in isolation and with few significant development initiatives.