EasterNile

Last week, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's press secretary took a break from official statements to post something different to her Twitter feed: a 37-line poem defending her country's massive dam on the Blue Nile River. "My mothers seek respite/From years of abject poverty/Their sons a bright future/And the right to pursue prosperity," Billene Seyoum wrote in her poem, entitled "Ethiopia Speaks". As the lines indicate, Ethiopia sees the $4.6 billion (four-billion-euro) Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam as crucial for its electrification and development. But the project, set to become Africa's largest hydroelectric installation, has sparked an intensifying row with downstream. Addis Ababa plans to start filling next month, despite demands from Cairo and Khartoum for a deal on the dam's operations to avoid depletion of the Nile. The African Union is assuming a leading role in talks to resolve outstanding legal and technical issues, an

Armed with a face mask, notebook and pen, Everlyne Akinyi Omondi sets out each morning from her one-room home in Nairobi’s informal settlement of Kawangware to do a job few others would contemplate in a pandemic. As cases of the new coronavirus climb and Kenyans are told to stay home and avoid human contact, 38-year-old Omondi moves house to house through Kawangware’s maze of narrow lanes. Standing at the doorways of the cramped, corrugated houses, she talks about COVID-19, shows residents how to wash hands or don a mask, patiently answering their questions. “I know there are risks of contracting the virus, but I don’t feel so scared. I have made a pledge to keep my community safe,” said Omondi, turning to reprimand a group of children crowded around her for not maintaining social distancing rules. “You see how small and close together the places where we live are. We have to make sure people understand how they can stop corona from spreading. Here, if one person gets

Ethiopia has reiterated it will start filling the reservoir of a controversial dam on the Nile - that has been at the centre of a  decade-long dispute  in East Africa - even without an agreement from Egypt and Sudan. The construction of the $4.6bn Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Blue Nile - which is more than 70 percent complete and promises to provide much-needed electricity to Ethiopia's 100 million people - has been a contentious point among the three Nile River Basin countries. "We will go ahead with the filling of the dam next month even if there's no agreement reached," Ethiopian Foreign Minister Gedu Andargachew told dpa news agency on Friday, adding that "Egypt's insistence on controlling the river flow" was hampering proceedings. A decade of arduous talks involving the two downstream countries, Egypt and Sudan, and upstream Ethiopia have reached a deadlock with Egypt  turning to the United Na