My final post! Conclusions

Welcome to my final blog post!

This being my final post on my blog on water and politics in Africa I wanted to outline my concluding thoughts on my blogging experience. Exploring a topic as broad as water and politics is made more complex when examining the world's second-largest continent. Whilst I was initially drawn to water and politics to delve into the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), I found myself being pulled in multiple directions toward many topics, not all of which were able to be covered in the time I had to write this blog. 

Figure one: Africa, the mother continent.

Setting out, I believed I had a good understanding of the GERD when in reality I was oblivious to the vast extent to which pre and post-colonial tensions have influenced the relationships between riparian countries and molded the course of actions in the Nile basin. This is why I have dedicated a post to the dichotomy of collaboration and conflict which is so naively accepting of these neo-colonial existing tensions and, in my opinion, extremely pessimistic! Unfortunately,  I realised too late that the real 'losers' to the lack of collaboration through an integrative basin-wide agreement are the everyday people who rely on the waters of the Nile. Just as Binyavanga Wainaina urges us to avoid writing about Africa in vague terms, referring not to specific people and countries, the stories of the individual people are being swept under the rug. Delving into community-based initiatives would have been an interesting way to explore bottom-up approaches to water governance. This way, I could understand better how policies that reinforce the autonomy of water users, strengthen self-governance.

Furthermore, I would have liked to have explored and compared a different transboundary water basin in order to establish similarities and differences between states and ascertain whether countries could learn from the successful collaboration of other riparians. My tunnel vision for learning about the GERD probably restricted me to  East Africa and this is partly why I wrote my final post on the future of water and politics under the magnifying glass of climate change. The difficulty of attempting to examine the whole continent however is that neither the climates, communities, economies, environments, governments, nor cultures are the same as each country has its own rich history. It should lastly but crucially, be acknowledged that whilst this blog series has been labeled as water and politics I hope by now you would recognise the undeniable connections to topics such as food, environmental change, and energy. 

I have greatly enjoyed writing these entries and my reflections above reveal to me that I have developed my knowledge of the complexity of the GERD's functioning and can assess the challenging relationships between the Nile basin states. I have hope for the continued and improved collaboration between riparians and desire to see a basin-wide plan to more sustainably allocate the use of water.