(6) Concluding Thoughts

As the last post for my blog on water and politics in Africa, I would like to use this opportunity to summarise my 3-month education journey. One of the most enjoyable parts of my research was making connections between water and various themes. Despite my focus on water and politics, they together cannot be dissociated from other topics as well, such as energy, gender and sanitation. The interconnected between water and development reminds me to examine the bigger picture when looking at human and physical issues that affect water provision in Africa.

When I first started my blog, I did not account for how politics of water can play out at varying levels. I started my blog with a tunnel vision of simply looking at water issues through regional level, navigating competitions resulted from the Nile’s shared transboundary water resources. I soon realised that conflicts over water resources also materialise on the international level in COP and other international treaties. The Nile Basin was used as an arena where foreign actors such as USA and China rival for power through manipulating African states with funds and debts. Not only do we need to analyse water through multiple spatial scales, but also different temporal scales to create a full picture of Africa’s hydropolitics. Current debates on water rights and resource management in the Nile River Basin are a result of the region’s colonial history. The disagreements on water treaties and alleged neo-colonial influences on hydrological projects are only to the detriment of the common people who rely on the river for their daily lives. To this end, I finished my blog series offering top-down and bottom-up solutions on personal, community, and national levels to the problems encountered in my blog. 

In retrospect, I should have spent more time exploring water issues at the community level, particularly the achievements and limitations of community-based initiatives. I also oriented my blog around regional/ international negotiations and infrastructure fundings, but less on topics related to sanitation and gender. Nevertheless, I greatly enjoyed creating these blog posts: be that approaching various themes for the first time at lectures, stimulating arguments during discussions with peers in seminars, or deepening my understanding of particular issues when conducting independent research. Not only was I able to decipher the complex relations between water, development and politics, but also draw from diverse (African) literature to achieve interdisciplinary synergies. I have completed this module gaining strong analytical skills to access the relationship between people and water resources through geographical lenses. 

As we are stepping into 2023, this symbolises a new page of improved and more sustainable water supply in Africa in the coming year. I end this blog with a music video by the Nile project. The song is a harmony of musical styles from all 11 African countries that border the Nile river system. Just like music, I am confident that people along the Nile can collaborate successfully to achieve a common basin-wide vision for the equitable allocation and use of water.