Conflict and instability across Africa in the 21st century have been shaped by politics, ideology, interventionism, and other factors. However, future tensions in the region and neighbouring regions may increasingly be driven by natural resources, particularly water. Two of the most pressing water disputes involve Ethiopia, which holds upstream control, and Egypt and Somalia, both downstream nations. As Addis Ababa’s control over the Blue Nile, Juba, and Shabelle river systems has expanded, cooperation between Cairo and Mogadishu has also strengthened.
While the geopolitical landscape across the Horn and North Africa has evolved on multiple fronts, including Somaliland’s recognition, water security remains a central element in the statecraft and strategic competition between Cairo, Addis Ababa, and Mogadishu due to al-Shabab insurgency, Ethiopia’s pursuit of port access, and the growing presence of foreign actors in the region. This article analyses the current situation by examining Addis Ababa’s upstream advantage over key water sources, key actors involved in the dispute, and how the absence of formal governance frameworks could allow tensions to spill over into the broader geopolitical landscape.
The opening of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) in September 2025, following more than a decade of stalled negotiations, has heightened the risk of tensions between Ethiopia and Egypt and increased domestic pressure in Cairo. From Cairo’s perspective, Ethiopia’s control over the Nile River directly threatens Egypt’s vital interests and overall survival. As diplomatic efforts continue to fail, Cairo might seek alternatives to protect its lifeline – the Nile River – which could jeopardize international trade, regional stability, and freedom of movement.
Of Egypt’s 111 million people, 95% live within a few miles of the Nile River. Of the three tributaries of the Nile, the Atbara, the Blue Nile, and the White Nile, the Blue Nile, which originates in Ethiopia, accounts for 57%. If Ethiopia was to restrict or significantly alter the Nile’s water flow, it could pose an existential threat to Egypt’s water, food, and environmental security. Egypt sought to pressure Ethiopia through a 2024 UN Security Council complaint and again in October 2025; however, the international community has yet to act. Most recently, in November 2025, Egypt’s Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation reported that GERD released uncoordinated water volumes, resulting in unstable downstream flows.
Map of the Nile River Basin and Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (Image Credit: Council on Foreign Relations)
If Cairo believes it has exhausted all avenues of international cooperation, it may feel compelled to adopt more significant measures to attract global attention and negotiate more favourable terms with Ethiopia. However, Egypt’s economic statecraft capacity to respond to and mitigate the effects of GERD is constrained by high debt and inflation, leaving it heavily reliant on aid and investment from countries such as the US and the UAE, as well as IMF loans. Still, Egypt maintains control of the Suez Canal, which accounts for 15% of global trade. Egypt also remains an active member of the African Union (AU) and BRICS, providing an additional diplomatic option it could use to counter Ethiopia, as evidenced by Egypt’s AU peacekeeping deployments to Somalia in recent years. Formal military action or economic retaliation remains unlikely but not impossible, given international pressure and Egypt’s reliance on global partners to sustain its economy. Some scholars, including Dr. Hamdy Hassan of Zayed University, suggest that Egypt’s options include either continuing its strategy of leveraging its relationship with Somalia to pressure Ethiopia or exploring other diplomatic avenues, such as the AU and BRICS.
Besides the Nile, Ethiopia also controls the upstream portions of the Juba and Shabelle rivers, the lifeline of Somalia’s water security and agricultural sector, both of which have struggled in recent decades. Ethiopia has also undertaken large projects on the Juba and Shabelle river systems, including several large dams that affect downstream nations such as Somalia. If Addis Ababa were to use its leverage over an already fragile system, it would be detrimental to Somalia’s security and its path to stability.
The Juba and Shabelle river systems historically flow through southwestern Somalia, with the Juba located primarily in the federal member state of Jubbaland and the Shabelle in the Southwestern State and Hirshabelle. The plains of Somalia's rivers have long served as the country’s breadbasket; however, due to climate change, recurrent droughts, floods, and mismanagement stemming from the federal government's fragility and conflict with al-Shabab, Somalia’s water security is highly vulnerable. In addition to domestic water security challenges, roughly 90% of the Juba and Shabelle rivers originate in Ethiopia. Ethiopia has several dams and power stations on river systems that feed the Juba and Shabelle, including the Genale-Dawa III (GD-3) dam in the Genale-Dawa River Basin and the Melka Wakena hydro-reservoir on the Shabelle River, among others. While tensions over water security between Mogadishu and Addis Ababa have not received as much attention as the GERD, the dispute persists. For example, in 2016, the leader of Somalia's federal state, Abdi Mohamud Omar, accused Ethiopia of releasing water from upstream reservoirs, thereby causing flooding in Somalia. In October 2024, Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud again accused Ethiopia of deliberately releasing water from upstream dams.
Map of the Jubba and Shabelle River Basin (Image Credit: Somali Centre for Water and Environment)
Unlike Cairo’s efforts to mitigate Addis Ababa’s expansion of hydroelectric projects and attract international attention, Mogadishu faces immediate security and governance challenges that have pushed the issue of water sovereignty down the political agenda. This includes Somalia’s ongoing fight against al-Shabaab, displacement, tensions with the federal states, and the question of sovereignty over Somaliland, which signed a memorandum of understanding with Ethiopia in January 2024, further heightening regional tensions. However, Mogadishu’s strengths lie in its shared vulnerabilities with Cairo, driving the two closer together in shared purpose to mitigate Ethiopia in, first, obtaining port access through Somaliland consequently undermining Somalia sovereign claims, and second, having unilateral leverage over the Blue Nile.
Despite controlling major upstream river basins, Ethiopia also faces water security challenges due to recurrent droughts, water pollution, and deforestation, driven in part by rapid population growth in recent decades. However, Ethiopia has experienced significant economic growth since the early 2000s, averaging approximately 9.4% annual growth in gross domestic product (GDP) between 2010 and 2020. The country’s growth has been driven primarily by the prioritisation of large-scale government-led public investments in infrastructure, including hydroelectric power stations, dams, and reservoirs. The mindset and strategy behind these investments being to ultimately make Ethiopia the leading renewable energy exporter in the Horn of Africa and the broader region. Ethiopia already exports electricity to Djibouti, Sudan, and Kenya, and demand is growing, with new nations, including South Sudan, joining Addis Ababa’s renewable energy trade, as evidenced by a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed in May 2022. The GERD alone could double the country’s electricity generation capacity.
South Sudan’s Energy and Dam Minister, Peter Marcello, Sign MoU with Ethiopia May 2022 (Image Credit: The Horn Tribune)
Supporters of Ethiopia’s ambitious hydroelectric projects, including the GERD, argue that they will have no downstream impacts, will be mutually beneficial for the wider region, and can protect downstream areas during extremely wet years. Additionally, Ethiopia maintains that these projects, including GERD, are essential to Ethiopia’s economic development. Critics, on the other hand, claim that Addis Ababa’s unilateral decision-making, bad-faith negotiating over the past few decades, and defiance of international norms might force the hand of downstream nations such as Egypt and Somalia. This includes Ethiopia's refusal to permit international monitoring or oversight of the dam, which heightens Cairo’s scepticism and makes GERD one of the world's few critical infrastructure projects that repeatedly resist independent or external oversight. In the future, Addis Ababa may have to decide how to leverage its upstream advantage and whether it is willing to sacrifice regional cohesion in exchange for economic gains.
A common theme across both disputes is the lack of adherence to water governance and formal frameworks that neither address contemporary issues in water security nor include nation-states within the same basin. For example, Egypt cites Nile water rights under the 1929 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty and the 1959 Nile Waters Agreement, both of which allocated water between Sudan and Egypt. However, Addis Ababa does not recognise these treaties. Ethiopian officials argue that one is a colonial-era agreement, while the 1959 accord excludes upstream states from the Nile Basin. Multiple attempts have been made to create a formal governance framework in recent decades. The most promising is the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI), created in 1999 to coordinate and sustainably manage the Nile River Basin among the ten nations within the basin. However, claims and water rights have not been discussed in accordance with the principles of NBI’s Cooperative Framework Agreement, which covers cooperation, sustainable development, and equitable utilization, among others. Instead, a series of failed negotiations over recent decades has ensued, most recently the African Union (AU)-led negotiations that started in 2020.
On the Somali side, there is no formal treaty governing water rights and use between Somalia and Ethiopia. Arguably, this could facilitate more effective mediation between the two, as they can build the treaty's infrastructure from the ground up rather than contesting the recognition of prior treaties. Without treaties between Egypt, Ethiopia, and Somalia, progress on other issues facing the wider region might be stalled. If no nation perceives a political outcome as mutually beneficial or as a compromise, multilateralism seems unlikely. The non-zero-sum game will ensue, including Addis Ababa’s goals of port access, Somalia’s sovereignty crisis, al-Shabab insurgency, and Egypt’s security over the Nile River.
Three actions that can be undertaken in the near future by relevant actors and the international community include:
Water security, rather than ideology or purely military means, will likely be an important factor in geopolitical competition in the Horn of Africa and the wider region. Ethiopia’s upstream position and control over major river basins give Addis Ababa an unparalleled advantage in pursuing other geopolitical interests in the region, thereby reshaping power dynamics. Recognizing this advantage, Egypt and Somalia’s strategic relationship has grown closer in recent years, in part due to their shared water vulnerability, among other factors.
Addis Ababa’s position reflects a broader pattern in contemporary geopolitics: the decision to either embrace multilateralism to secure mutually beneficial and compromising agreements with its neighbours, or to pursue its own interests unilaterally, possibly through coercion. Failing to establish formal water governance frameworks risks the water security of an entire region and sets a precedent that political compromise may no longer be on the table for other immediate issues, including the sovereignty dispute over Somaliland, Ethiopia’s long-term ambitions for port access, and the continued fight against al-Shabab. Additionally, if agreements are not struck in the future, the imperative to use water as a form of statecraft will be more commonplace.
For this reason, cooperation between Egypt, Ethiopia, and Somalia is no longer simply an environmental issue but a regional security priority. By engaging reliable third parties, establishing mechanisms for transparency and good-faith negotiation, and leveraging existing governance structures with technical and institutional expertise, there will be increased likelihood of achieving sustainable outcomes. Prevention and proactivity among stakeholders will be far less costly than a geopolitical crisis in the future, in a region facing other significant geopolitical issues.
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