From Haile Selassie to crowdfunding, how Ethiopia’s GERD dam was born | Energy News | USAEMALL.com

Abdulhakim Shamsuddin was 14 and in high school in the city of Dire Dawa when he first heard that he could contribute to the building of a dam on the Blue Nile.

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, known by its acronym GERD, was pitched as Ethiopia’s most ambitious infrastructure venture, which promised to harness the river’s power to propel Ethiopia to reliable energy access and prosperity.

Not long after then-Prime Minister Meles Zenawi announced the project in April 2011, Shamsuddin’s teacher gave a presentation on the dam and its significance and encouraged students to give small contributions for its construction, then estimated at $4.5bn. Across the country, everyone – from civil servants to shoe shiners – pitched in.

The government turned to Ethiopians like Shamsuddin to help crowdsource the dam’s funding to plug financing gaps, giving everyone, even children, a stake in the project’s success.

Nearly 14 years on, Shamsuddin’s modest contribution is among millions that have helped deliver Africa’s largest hydroelectric project, inaugurated on Tuesday, two days before the Ethiopian New Year.

“You can guess when you participate in something from your childhood and see your work and success growing up how it feels,” said Shamsuddin, who is now a doctor in Dire Dawa. “That’s what makes the current moment special.”

Ethiopia’s journey – from Zenawi’s laying of the first ceremonial stone in 2011 to the completion of the GERD – has been anything but straightforward, yet it marks the culmination of a project that was a century in the making.

In an interview filmed beside the dam last week, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said: “Previous generations dreamed of harnessing the Abbay River [Blue Nile], but their efforts were constrained. Today, that vision has come to life.”

From dream to design

The earliest mentions of a plan to build a dam across the Nile date back to the early 1900s when the United Kingdom and Italy, major colonial powers in northeast Africa, considered and then abandoned plans to build one along the Blue Nile in the northwest of the country.

The idea gained momentum after the United States withdrew funding for the Aswan Dam from an increasingly assertive, pro-Soviet Egypt in the 1950s. Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, the US’s principal African ally, commissioned the US Bureau of Reclamation to study possible sites for a dam.

“However generously Ethiopia may be prepared to share this tremendous God-given wealth of hers with friendly neighbouring countries,” Selassie said in 1957, “it is Ethiopia’s primary and sacred duty to develop her water resources in the interest of her own rapidly expanding population and economy.”

These plans were met with concern in Egypt and Sudan, which were worried that a major dam could reduce the river’s flow and the amount of freshwater available for irrigation and other uses.

In 1929, the UK, which then ruled Sudan, concluded a treaty with Egypt that gave Cairo the largest allocation of the Nile’s waters and a block on upstream construction projects. After Sudan’s independence in 1956, it agreed a new treaty with Egypt in 1959 that essentially established their exclusive control over Nile water usage while excluding other riparian states from decision-making.

Ethiopia wasn’t a party to either agreement and rejected both. “Despite contributing so much to the river, Ethiopia uses virtually none of it,” wrote Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who served as Ethiopia’s foreign minister from 2012 to 2016.

As different Ethiopian governments came and went over the following decades, the idea for a dam lay dormant until it was taken up by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), a left-wing coalition of several ethnic parties that formally launched the project in April 2011 to much fanfare.

Zenawi, who led the EPRDF, believed “development was a matter of national survival”. Bereket Simon, an information minister in 2014, said “poverty and backwardness are the number one enemy” and called for the country to be on a war footing.

To this end, the government sought to create conditions in which poverty could be eradicated by facilitating growth, which involved expanding healthcare, education and infrastructure and, crucially, enhancing access to energy.

“The Ethiopia we inherited was dark and rural,” Mulugeta Gebrehiwot, an Ethiopia researcher at the World Peace Foundation, a peace research institute at Tufts University in the US, who also worked in the government in the late 1990s, told Al Jazeera. To this day, despite major advances, about 60 million Ethiopians have no electricity.

Hydropower leader

Ethiopia is considered “Africa’s water tower” because of the generous precipitation it enjoys and its many rivers, and hydropower would play a large role in remedying its chronic energy shortages. Several dams were completed in the early 2000s, making the country Africa’s leading hydroelectricity producer. But the idea of constructing a far larger dam across the Nile really began to take shape only in the late 2000s.

“Around the late 2000s, the technical capacity, political will and financial conditions aligned to enable the then-ruling EPRDF to kick-start construction,” said Biruk Terrefe, a lecturer on African politics at the University of Bayreuth in Germany who researches infrastructure projects.

After laying GERD’s first cornerstone in 2011, Zenawi said in a speech: “No matter how poor we are, in the Ethiopian traditions of resolve, the Ethiopian people will pay any sacrifice.”

The overwhelming majority of the dam was funded through Ethiopia’s state institutions, but an official told state media that from 2023 to 2024 alone an estimated 1.712 billion birr (roughly $21m) was raised by Ethiopians. From 2022 to 2025, another official said, Ethiopia’s diaspora contributed $10m.

Public sector workers contributed parts of their salaries, and bonds were issued to Ethiopians who wished to lend. The main message about GERD was that it would be funded entirely at home.

“These contributions weren’t coming from people with deep pockets. The public rallied behind the project because they believed it would change the country’s future,” Mulugeta said.

Abdifatah Hussein Abdi, an MP with the ruling Prosperity Party in the regional parliament of Ethiopia’s Somali state, a historically marginal region, said he forfeited about 3 to 4 percent of his salary for the project while working in the municipality of Jigjiga for more than a decade. “There were regular electricity shortages in my district, and I wanted to help, but also on a national level, we felt it would move the country forward,” he told Al Jazeera.

Musa Sheko Mengi, a prominent activist rallying support for GERD in the capital, Addis Ababa, said he has invested in half a dozen bonds because he considers the dam a “gateway to hope” for Ethiopia.

“Most of our citizens live in darkness. We hope this dam will mark the beginning of a new era in Ethiopia,” he said.

“The dam has had the unique power to galvanise Ethiopians despite major internal fault lines,” Terrefe told Al Jazeera. “It’s been a source of collective pride across the political spectrum for many who have contributed to its construction.”

Debt, delays and political roadblocks

Zenawi died in 2012, a year after the construction of GERD started. His tenure was characterised by rapid growth but also great repression, and after his death, the EPRDF began to fragment.

The country also accumulated unsustainable amounts of foreign debt to fund other infrastructure projects, which jeopardised the state-led model of development.

Abiy came to power in 2018 promising “deep reform”, including opening Ethiopia’s economy to the private sector and allowing greater political freedoms.

Although the dam was roughly two-thirds complete when he took office, progress on the project faced serious setbacks in his early years. Just four months after Abiy came to power, the dam’s chief engineer, Simegnew Bekele, was found dead in the centre of the capital. Police said he died by suicide.

Abiy blamed many of Ethiopia’s problems on the previous government, which was dominated by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), and methodically removed officials he believed were close to the party from office. This included dozens of officials in state-run companies that were contracted to complete parts of the dam who were arrested in 2018 on corruption charges.

At the time, Abiy said the project might take up to a decade to complete at the rate it was moving.

Conflicts also spread across the country, culminating in the two-year Tigray war, which began in November 2020 and became one of the deadliest conflicts of the 21st century with some estimates placing the death toll as high as 600,000.

Despite further delays and funding shortages, the GERD was eventually completed in July although it has been generating power since 2022. In 2024, the dam was meeting 16 percent of Ethiopia’s electricity needs, according to officials working on it.

Officials working on the dam estimated that it could generate up to $1bn in revenue through energy exports.

‘Threat’ to the region?

Although Ethiopian officials have repeatedly insisted that the dam will not harm the interests of downstream countries, this has not alleviated their concerns. Egypt and Sudan fear it could undermine their access to the river and have knock-on impacts for agriculture and urban water supplies. They issued a joint statement last week describing the dam as a “threat”.

Sudan has two major tributaries of the Nile within its borders, which merge in Khartoum. Egypt, by contrast, relies almost entirely on the single river after this confluence for more than 90 percent of its freshwater and has tended to take a stronger position on Ethiopia’s dam.

In 2013, Mohamed Kamel Amr, who was Egypt’s foreign minister at the time, put it starkly when he said: “No Nile, no Egypt”. Successive Egyptian presidents from Gamal Abdel Nasser to Mohamed Morsi have even threatened military action if an agreement is not reached between the countries on fair water usage.

Talks have been stop-start since the project began in 2011, but they have not produced an agreement that addresses the concerns of all parties. A small breakthrough took place in 2015 when a declaration of principles was signed, recognising Ethiopia’s right to build the dam and committing the three countries to equitable use, no significant harm and further agreements on filling and operation.

But this wasn’t followed up, and by July 2020, Ethiopia began its first filling of the GERD’s reservoir, which is estimated to be around the size of Greater London.

“Egypt is seeking a fair system to regulate usage of the Nile, especially during drought years, as the country needs a minimum flow,” said Abbas Shakary, a geologist at Cairo University. It is already one of the world’s driest countries and is struggling with water scarcity due to rising temperatures.

In the past, the major sticking point was how fast the dam would be filled. That issue and the dam’s existence more broadly are now “a fait accompli”, said Biruk Terrefe, the politics lecturer.

“The underlying conflict is about trust and the incompatible historical claims on the Nile,” he added. “Ideally, the next step would be to re-engage multilaterally through the Nile Basin Initiative, the African Union and other regional players.”