Growing up in Wollo, Northeastern part of Ethiopia, I always wondered why my country could be so underdeveloped, despite its resources like the Nile River, while others were blossoming. Being from Wollo, a province adversely impacted by the 1983–1985 famine and where hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians perished as a result, I know firsthand the catastrophic impacts of drought and heavy reliance on rain-fed agriculture.
Although I was born after the 1983–1985 famine and did not lose immediate family members due to the famine, I remember mothers on the playground sobbing, “if it had not been for those evil days, my child would be here playing with you all.” In school, I often heard students respond with, “one of my brothers or sisters died during the famine,” when asked how many siblings they had. The school I went to was named “Bati Red Cross 77” to honor the organization that saved the lives of many Wolloyes through food and medical aid.
As a child, I remember asking why we (Ethiopians) experienced hunger and my father responded with an Amharic proverb, “Yabayin lij wuha temaw,” which literally means “Nile’s child got thirsty.” What my father was saying is that citizens of a country with a valuable resource like the Nile River were dying from hunger. An epiphany I had as I grew older was that the only way to prevent famines in the future was to use the Nile River for irrigation.
In 2011, while in law school, I heard about the beginning of the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (gerd), the first-ever large-scale Ethiopian dam to be built on the Blue Nile in Ethiopia. Like many students, I gave up some of my breakfast funds to raise money to support the project. The construction of the gerd caused me to reflect on how I could do more to help my country. I realized how few Ethiopian experts specialized in international watercourses law and decided to specialize in this field. Upon graduation in 2013, I started working at Dire Dawa University as a lecturer and taught various courses relevant to the subject matter. In 2015, I completed a research paper on the agreement on the declaration of principles between Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt; I presented it at a national conference organized by Dire Dawa University.
My teaching and research introduced me to a renowned scholar of international watercourses law, Prof. Stephen C. McCaffrey, who teaches at McGeorge School of Law; I decided to pursue my Ph.D./jsd study under his supervision. In 2017, I began a multidisciplinary study on the legal and hydro-political trajectories of the Nile Basin. From the beginning, I found that the academic discourse regarding the Nile watercourse is primarily dominated by monodisciplinary
Indeed, since the Nile Basin presents multifaceted problems, solutions and alternative proposals must deal with myriad issues influencing the legal and hydro-political interest of the Nile Basin States. Throughout this book, I have addressed several intertwined issues that cannot be dealt with in isolation while ensuring that the book does not lack focus.
Given my background as an Ethiopian, it was difficult to be dispassionate on many of the issues discussed in this book. However, I aimed to be as objective, thorough, and non-partisan as possible and tried to avoid subjective and speculative biases, and provided supporting authorities, facts, and figures for all my claims.