River
River Nile
The longest river in Africa and the water source on which Egypt depends almost entirely. It is the defining case of transboundary water dependence: Egypt receives essentially all its water from beyond its borders.
Key facts
- Length
- approximately 6,650 km
- Basin area
- approximately 3.25 million km²
- Riparian countries
- 11
- Egypt’s dependency on external water
- over 95%
Why it matters
The Nile has two principal branches: the White Nile, which provides steady baseflow from the equatorial lakes, and the Blue Nile, which rises in the Ethiopian highlands and supplies the great majority of the annual flow and almost all the sediment. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile has made the allocation question acute, because it gives an upstream state operational control over the timing of flow reaching Sudan and Egypt for the first time.
Relationships
- Located in: Egypt
Related intelligence
Sources
- World Wildlife Fund / McGill University — HydroSHEDS / HydroRIVERS / HydroLAKES / HydroBASINS. Open — attribution required · CC BY 4.0
- Global Water System Project — Global Reservoir and Dam Database. Open — attribution required · CC BY 4.0
- Peer-reviewed scientific literature — Open-access hydrology, water chemistry and water use research. Public but restricted · Publisher terms — public access, reuse not clearly granted