It is a 1.8 km long and 145 m high dam built on the Blue Nile by Ethiopia. The Blue Nile rises in Ethiopia and joins the White Nile in Khartoum, Sudan, to form the Nile, which ends in Egypt. The Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) is set to become the largest hydroelectric dam in Africa
with a production of 6,000 megawatts. It must allow Ethiopia to develop and increase its electricity production, in a country where half of the 110 million inhabitants do not have access to it.

The $ 4 billion project is expected to start producing electricity by the end of the year, before being fully operational by 2022. Ethiopia began construction in 2011, without consulting the Egypt which considers to have "historic rights" on the river, guaranteed by treaties. Since then, this project has been at the center of negotiations between the three countries crossed by the Nile: Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt.

This project mainly worries Egypt, located downstream from the river, and which depends on more than 90% of the Nile to obtain drinking water and supply its agricultural sector, even evokes an "existential threat". Cairo fears that the project will allow Ethiopia to control the flow of the longest river in Africa.

At the heart of the discord: the filling speed of the dam basins which represent 74 billion cubic meters of water. Egypt fears that too rapid filling of this immense reservoir will lead to too great a reduction in the flow of the Nile and affect the millions of Egyptians who depend on it.

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