Across the countries of the Nile Basin, dams play a crucial role in safeguarding the resilience of communities. Dams store water to attenuate the effects of droughts and floods, while also helping people harness seasonal freshwater to combat water scarcity and drought.

While dam failures are rare in the Nile Basin region, much like elsewhere in the world, when they do occur, communities risk forgoing these benefits and face devastating consequences. In 2024, the collapse of the Arba'at dam in Sudan's northeastern Red Sea State claimed over 130 lives, while a dam failure north of Nairobi, Kenya, resulted in at least 40 deaths.

With the support of the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), countries in the Nile Basin region have embarked on efforts to better identify and manage dam safety risks. The support is being provided through the Japan-World Bank Program for Mainstreaming Disaster Risk Management in Developing Countries (the Japan Program).

A major milestone of GFDRR’s support has been the development of an inventory of dams in the Nile Basin spanning parts of Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda.

At the most basic level, the inventory is helping governments in these countries track the location of dams, while also supporting the collection of key attributes about the dams. The inventory is also setting the stage for the development of appropriate regulatory frameworks and risk management approaches to ensure that the dams are safe and resilient for the long-term. 

To build the inventory, the technical team deployed earth observation and machine learning tools to detect dams in the nine countries and compile key attributes such as the geolocation, dam height, and the length of the dam crest. More than 800 dams were identified in the inventory, including hundreds previously absent from any national or global database. Earth observation was also used to screen the risks posed by potential dam failure to downstream populations.

"The remote sensing inventory was instrumental in identifying unregulated small dams in the Kenyan part of the Nile Basin.  With this foundation, we are able to improve our national registry of dams to ensure the safety of dams and to support our water resources planning going forward."

Eng. Chemeril Chepyegon
Representative, Government of Kenya
Technical Working Group for Dam Safety
Nile Cooperation for Climate Resilience Project

Japanese expertise played a critical role in catalyzing GFDRR’s partnership with Nile Basin countries. In particular, a 2020 report, which drew heavily on Japanese case studies, emphasized the importance of dam inventories for ensuring dam safety.

Even as governments in the Nile Basin countries begin developing regulatory frameworks for dam safety based on the inventory, this work is also driving and informing dam safety efforts in the wider African continent and beyond. 

For example, the initial development of the inventory informed dam safety activities under the Nile Cooperation for Climate Resilience Project. The project is financed by the Cooperation in International Waters in Africa, a trust fund hosted by the World Bank. It aims to promote regional cooperation among the Nile Basin countries on climate resilience, with a focus on dam safety as one of the project’s five main thematic areas.

The project has contributed to the creation and improvement of government units in charge of dam safety.  It has also contributed to the development of a Nile Basin-wide reference regulatory framework, technical guidelines, and a risk management framework for dam safety, which countries will tailor to their specific contexts.

In building the inventory, the team deliberately used an open-source algorithm to detect dams. This choice has enabled another half a dozen countries to learn from the approach and potentially follow their example.

GFDRR and Japan Program support for dam resilience in the Nile Basin builds on a longstanding engagement on this critical issue. Previously, for example, GFDRR and the Japan Program had supported a series of knowledge exchange activities that allowed countries like Indonesia and India to learn firsthand from Japanese experience on dam safety.