 I will start my presentation talking a little bit generally about the Nile and the regional political economy. And then I'll zoom in on the Eastern Nile a bit and also talk about the cooperation processes around the Nile-based initiative, the illegal agreements, and then also talk a little bit about the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam and finish off by talking about how do we see the way forward. I'm very lucky to speak before Ken because everything I forget to say, he will say and he will give you all the details and all the technical issues from the research. So if you miss something, it will probably come later in Ken's presentation. So about the Nile, it's a quite unique river basin. Firstly, it's shared by 11 countries, which is of course unusual in itself. It's extremely long. It is very uneven in terms of rainfall, in terms of climate zones, in terms of poverty levels and so, so very complex. It has two main water systems, you could say. The white Nile, which actually is white on here, no, that's not it. There we go, technology. Here is the white Nile coming from Lake Victoria here. And then we have what is called the blue Nile here. It's not blue at all. It's very brown. I learned in Sudanese Arabic, blue and brown has the same word. That's why it's called blue, but it's actually brown. I don't know if that's right, but that's what I was told by a Sudanese person. And then we, so those two systems are quite separate and different, but they join up here in Khartoum in the main Nile. And then we also have other tributaries. I mean, it's really complex. It's lots of water coming in from different directions. As I said, here is the Nile, and here we compare it to other big international rivers. The Nile is the longest, but when it comes to water, amount of water, it's like a tiny little stream. This is Amazonas and there. So it's very long, and it actually has very little water. So it's also very uneven when it comes to rainfall distribution. If you look, it's just important to remember, because this is what we call upstream. It's actually south and downstream is north. So the river obviously goes south to north. It confuses people sometimes. But the blue areas here are quite large amounts of rainfall, and then you come down to the dry areas up north. And in Cairo, it basically doesn't rain. They have an average rainfall of 25 millimeters per year, and there are basically no other surface water sources in Egypt. So Egypt is, you could say, entirely dependent on the Nile. For the upstream countries, you see here, there's a graph with GDP and rainfall. And you see the, this is from the World Bank, when Paul Block I learned, and the interrelations between GDP and rainfall. And it's very, very closely related, as Ethiopia is very much dependent on rainfall agriculture. Population growth is a challenge, or one of the main challenges, I would say, but very little water available in some of the countries, especially in Egypt, but very large increasing demands due to very rapid population growth. The projection is by 2050 to have 1 billion people in the region, and this of course increases the water stress with increasing demand on irrigation water and hydropower and so on. So this is something all countries are looking into and plan for. However, there is a huge potential, potential for storage. You can see the storage capacity could increase from, yeah, now very little to quite rapid. This is the plants in the region. The hydropower could go from 6,000 megawatt to 25,000, and the irrigation could increase up to 3 million hectares. So substantial untapped potential. And of course, all the countries in the region, they want to dig into this potential. They all have plans to do so. They have plans to increase hydropower and increase irrigation. And this is reflected in their national plans. Unfortunately, there's not yet any proper regional plan, but the Nile Basin initiative, they took all the national plans and did a study and see what did it end up with and came to the conclusion that if the countries implement all their plans, they will actually use twice as much water as is available in the Nile. So obviously, there is a need for cooperation and coordination of these plans. So that's, I mean, one of the many reasons why cooperation is crucial. I'll jump ahead here. And then I'm looking more into the Easter Nile, where more or less 85 percent of the water is in the Easter Nile system. And that is looking at four separate sub-basins. And Egypt, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Sudan are included in the Easter Nile system. This area suffers from erosion very much and high variability in water flows in years and between years. So that's normal. So floods and droughts is normal. And of course, large opportunities for development. A lot of foreign investments in irrigated agriculture in this space, especially in Sudan, is coming in. But we see rapid changing dynamics. There are a lot of things happening in this region over the last few years. We have South Sudan independence in 2011. Suddenly, there is a new country in the region. We had the uprising in Egypt, which went on for quite a few years with changing governments and instability and so on, that weakened Egypt's position. We have, of course, Sudan, which is moving from, you could say, an oil economy to a post-oil economy, going back to more focus on agriculture. And then Ethiopia with rapid economic growth, some instability as well. And also, I would say, shrinking space for civil society. So a lot of dynamics going on. Egypt has also, over the last few years, quite strongly tried to reduce its dependence on agriculture as a whole, but also improve water efficiency in the agriculture sector. So recently, for example, they have put in a rule about how much rice farmers are allowed to produce or how many hectares, to try to reduce the most water-consuming sectors. And this is, of course, quite sensitive in Egypt, where you already have instabilities and the relationship between farmers and the government is a critical thing. So they have not such an easy task to balance the different interests. This is just to look at Sudan, and if you ever fly over Sudan, you can actually see, I have seen from the flight, these round circles and wonder where they are. And that's actually the irrigation. You can see there, and that is, and this is expanding more and more and more. So these are quite large areas. So coming back to cooperation, several challenges, and it's not only about water quotas and having enough water, there's strong differences throughout history. They have ethnicity, Arabs and Africans, religion, Islam and Christianity, different colonial past, a history of water-related diplomatic conflicts as well, mistrust between countries that has built over long periods of time, and also power asymmetry, where Egypt has been more developed, the big power in the region, and therefore have been able to develop infrastructure and so on and had the veto right to upstream infrastructure development. So all these differences create some kind of mistrust in the region. It's quite promising to see recently, especially in Egypt, how they now are looking back into Africa in their foreign policy. For a long time, Africa wasn't really part of their interest, but now recent years they are really looking into how to create stronger relations with especially the Nile countries. But still, limited cooperative mechanism, one could say limited interest in cooperation, although there has always been some cooperation on the Nile issues, of course, and asymmetric economic development. And of course, I'm coming back to that, the existing water agreements, the agreements from the colonial times, 1929, 1959, that give water quotas to Sudan and Egypt, but not the upstream countries. So this mistrust manifests itself, of course, in headlines, in media. You can often see these kind of headlines when you talk about water wars and so on. So there's a lot of, I would say, misperceptions in the region, also misinformation and misperception that comes out in media, and of course, contributes to keeping this fear in the region. When I talk to Egyptian journalists, they say, oh, we always joke that soon we'll all have long beards because we won't have any water, so we can't shave our ourselves because Ethiopia will switch off the tap. And this is things that they say daily to each other, and it's part of what they somehow believe that Ethiopia can just switch off the tap at any time. And of course, this is the livelihood. This is Egypt's security interest number one, as they often state. So this is a very critical issue. And yeah, so we have to manage, the politicians obviously have to manage this, the fear among the public and the misunderstandings. One large attempt to establish or advance cooperation was the creation of the Nile Basin Initiative. It was launched in 1999. And it has been in some ways very successful. It attracted $200 million in support through the Nile Basin Trust Fund that was set up by the World Bank with 10 different donors to it. So a large amount of money. It has Nile Council of Ministers and three different centers that it operates through. The Nile Secretariat, which is facilitating cooperation. It also has NELSAP in Rwanda, which is looking at investment preparation and then ENTRO in Addis, looking at Easter Nile, also focusing on investment and modeling. It had a shared vision program to build trust. And this subsidiary action program was called to create an enabling environment for investment. This was very much about investment planning. The NBI is still there, but the Nile Basin Trust Fund has ended. So key mandates to facilitate cooperation and also to work on water resources management and water resources development. The results, on the infrastructure investment preparation, I would say it's been hugely successful. It has prepared $6 billion in investment and largely attracted financing to those investments plan. It has worked on capacity development. It created very good capacity in its three centers with decision support systems, modeling tools, and so on and policies. So, and it worked very closely also, I would say, with universities on these modeling issues. But the vision that they was from the beginning, one Nile one people, I wouldn't say we're there yet. Long way to go. And also, the NBI has become weaker in recent years, I would say, partly because Sudan and Egypt freeze the cooperation in 2010 due to political reasons. 2012, Sudan resumed its participation, but still it made the development partners hesitant to continue financing when there is a partial NBI that doesn't include all countries. The Nile Basin Trust Fund ended, so those funds ended and it made it a bit weaker than it used to be. But it's still there, and it's still working. Going into the more political track and looking at the historical agreements. 1929, it's quite a lot of slides left, but agreement Egypt and what was then called Anglo-Egyptian Sudan gave Egypt right to monitor upstream flows and veto construction projects upstreams. The 1959 agreement is the one that is usually referred to in negotiations, and that one was only between Egypt and Sudan, didn't give any water quotas to upstream countries and it divided the water between Egypt, Sudan and evaporation, you could say. There are very big evaporation losses in the region. And then I also just wanted to mention the international treaties, the Helsinki rules I have to mention, especially as we are here today. And the 1997 UN Convention on the Law on Non-Navigational Use of International Water Courses is usually referred to as the UN Convention on Transboundary Water. And that one actually entered into force 2014. It took a long time, but now it is into force. The Cooperative Framework Agreement negotiation, the idea was to go from a Nile-basin initiative which doesn't really have a strong legal status to have this Cooperative Framework Agreement which would in turn create the Nile-basin commission, which would be an intergovernmental commission that would take over much of the rights and decision-making from the countries, basically. And several key norms are included in the Cooperative Framework Agreement. But there is one Article 14B which they don't agree on. And that is basically about reference to the 1959 Agreement on the, what is called, the current uses and rights. So the 14B is about water security and the upstream countries don't want to recognize the 1959 Agreement while Egypt and Sudan want to have reference to that. The CFA status, I think I mentioned most of it already, but it could be interesting to know that 10 to 2011, six states signed the CFA, upstream states. But so far only three countries have ratified the CFA and it needs six ratifications to enter into force. So it's not into force yet and it's been a slow process and no new ratification in the last couple of years. So we don't know where that is going right now if there will be an iBasing Commission or not. And I'll jump into the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. In February 2011, Ethiopia announced that it's building the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, the biggest dam in Africa. This came at the time, of course, shortly after the freeze of the cooperation in the NBI from Egypt and Sudan. And it also came in a time where Egypt was affected by internal turmoil. And it changed the power dynamics quite a lot, I would say, because I would say Egypt probably didn't think it would be possible for Ethiopia to develop such a large dam because they were quite sure that with their veto power no external financiers would go in and finance it. But Ethiopia managed to raise the funds from their own public, which is quite impressive. So basically every government employee in Ethiopia gives one month's salary per year to the dam project, but it's also fundraising a lot from other private people, expats and so on. So they are financing by themselves. And this, of course, because the Ethiopian people are financing it, they consider it their dam. The Ethiopian people are very proud of the dam. And they say it's my dam. I'm part of it. I'm financing it. I own it. So this is very important in terms of how to manage this dam and the expectations from the Ethiopian people. It was a unilateral decision. And yeah, it's a large, huge dam with a capacity of 6,000 megawatt. The Aswan Hai Dam in Egypt has a capacity of 2,100 megawatt. And they need to be operated in some kind of cooperation to ensure efficient hydropower production, but also to manage water flows, of course. So the economic benefits that Ken will speak about later. You have some very exciting figures. But the dam will also help a lot to smooth variability, of course. So it can reduce the flood risks, especially in Sudan. This is flooding in Khartoum, 2014. But it also gives huge irrigation potential for Sudan as the water flow is more stable. There are some challenges ahead. I mean, this electricity that is generated, it has to be sold. And to be sold, it must be connected to transmission lines. And those are not there largely yet. So they are being built. But there is a power cell agreement with Sudan. But largely agreements are not in place yet. The transmission lines are being constructed at the same time as the dam. Very difficult to know what the end result will be in terms of ability to sell this power to the region. But the most important is a huge 500 kilovolt transmission line to Sudan, which is being constructed right now. And in this process, of course, short of the announcement of the dam, the countries came together and they decided to establish an international panel of experts. And that panel of experts came up with a report and which called for additional studies. In parallel, there were many series of ministerial level meetings. And those meetings came up with a declaration of principles, which is a really important document. Because this is the only type of agreement, if it now is a legal agreement that's a bit debated. But between the countries on the dam, and this declaration is a very short document, but it has some very important aspects into it on cooperation and not causing significant damage and so on. And this is, of course, crucial. But all the details are still lacking. So it was also a tripartite national technical committee that formed in 2014. This one has met 12 times so far in the two years, so once every second month, basically. So far we haven't really seen anything coming out and all the negotiations are secret. But it's definitely a very slow process. All the decisions from this committee must be in consensus and that takes very long time. However, three years after the report from the international panel of experts came and recommended studies, the consultancy agreement to do the studies was finally signed on Tuesday this week. So now they're going to do some studies, looking at the modeling of the hydropower and the water flows and also doing a social environmental impact assessment. This is now starting. Of course, the dam is being constructed full speed and the filling is expected to start at the next rainy season, which probably starts in July next year. So they have 11 months to finalize this study that could have an impact on the filling strategies. But of course, coordinated releases from the GERD and the Aswan High Dam is needed. And that has to be agreed upon by this tripartite committee. This slide I have stolen with pride from Kevin Wheeler, Oxford University. We did a training of journalists a few weeks ago in Ethiopia. I will not go into the details of this one, but this is just to show two different scenarios. One with what we called basic cooperation and one with continuous cooperation. And here he's looking at the probability of some kind of, can we call it crisis mode, when the water level goes below 150 meters in the high Aswan Dam, which one would say that then we can start talking about significant harm and so on, which have an impact on irrigation and hydropower generation. So depending on how much water is released from the ground Ethiopian Renaissance Dam during the filling, the probability of coming into too low water level in the next dam is here. So with the basic cooperation, you have here some dam drought operations. They are already in place. They are used. But there's still a quite big risk, a too big risk probably here that the water levels be too low. But if you do some agreements here and cooperate continuously, then that risk will reduce significantly. So there are possibilities to reduce risks through cooperation. That is the main message from this figure. You can read it. It's actually open access on international waters, water international, if you want to go into the details. So just to go into intense and rapid changes, increase risk of crisis. This is something that's often stated by some scholars at least. And so I just want to summarize here all the rapid changes in the region that the countries have to deal with. The signing of the CFA in 2010, the 2011 Tahir Square protest, the GERD announcements, South Sudan independence, and things like that. Very many things happened. And this, of course, put a lot of pressure on the country's capacity to deal with change. So how do we move ahead from talking to something better? I would argue that we need to work with a wide range of actors that can influence what is happening in the region. This morning, we heard about track one and track two. Diplomacy, we could divide those tracks into nine tracks, as is done by the Institute for Multitrack Diplomacy that I've stolen this round circle from. It's talk about different actors. Of course, it's the government that we want to influence. But often, we can't do that directly. So we have to work with other actors that can help. So professionals, the business is an important actor in this region with lots of foreign investment in the countries. And they, of course, want stability, but they also impact on the development through investments in irrigated agriculture. Very influential private citizens. Research, crucial, very important. And then we have religious leader. We have funding, development cooperation, and so on. And then we have the media up here. That's the public opinion. So it's a long time since diplomacy was only made in secret rooms. I mean, now diplomacy is really open, I would say. So the public track is more and more important. You can't hide anything. There's a set of, oh, no. There. First, you can see water levels. You can see what's going on. So you can't hide what you're doing. But it's also coming out through Facebook, Twitter, so on very rapidly. This picture is from a training of 27 journalists that we did recently. Journalists from Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, South Sudan going to the GERD. And this is the GERD manager trying to explain to the Egyptian delegation here what is happening. And they asked questions for a whole day there. But I think it was a very good training. So we are working different that through academia with new knowledge and so on, and to create the awareness and try to reduce misperception and fears. The technical track, I would say there is still very little shared understanding among the Eastern Isle countries. There's lots of international research. The research in the specific countries, they often come to very different results, depending on which countries presenting them. So it's very little kind of joint understanding. So here, there is a crucial role of actors to improve the understanding. And then, of course, the political track. And here, we have foreign affairs, heads of states, security, water ministers, and so on. And they often don't have exactly the same visions. So we have to be aware of that because we have a good conversation with the water minister. We can't be 100% sure that this is actually going to be reflected in the foreign policy in the end. So we have to be aware of those complications, too. And we need to communicate with all those levels. Here, we need to work on trust building. We need to develop guarantees. And some example of guarantees will be presented from Ken, but technical, legal, and economic guarantees. Because we work on the trust building, but the mistrust is there. And then we need to have other ways of ensuring that the harm will be minimized. And yeah, I just wanted to mention also the role of Sudan. Sudan has actually played a very critical role in this whole process. Sometimes we refer to Sudan as a mediator between Egypt and Sudan. The countries themselves are not always so happy with that term. But it's very much true that Sudan has played a critical role in the reconciliation and in finding some kind of middle ground. So I think that has enabled a lot of the progress that has been seen so far. And this is my actually last slide. Took a bit long, but we have a long time here. So I just wanted to mention some lessons learned to be aware of for involvement as third parties. To play this role in trying to promote cooperation, it helps to be a neutral and trusted partner. Long-term commitment is needed. There are no quick fixes. Interventions must think about relationships, and it's people. So personal relationship, you must know who you're talking to. And coordination between all this different track is crucial. I would say we can learn so much from each other if we work together, diplomats, academia, media, and so on. We really can come up with innovative solutions if we work together. And the strategic knowledge is not only useful for the countries in denial, but also for the foreign, the external foreign policies and development partners. So these are just some of the things to think about. Yes, that was the end.