Egypt’s Minister of Water Resources and Irrigation Mohamed Abdel Aty discussed the project of the navigation corridor between Lake Victoria and the Mediterranean, in a meeting on Sunday with Matthew Parks, a US government water expert, and Nicole Champagne, the US deputy ambassador in Cairo.
The project aims to transform the Nile into a navigational artery linking the Nile Basin countries. It should start from the main source of the Nile in Lake Victoria which is located between Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya.
Mohammed Ghanem, the Irrigation Ministry’s spokesperson, told Daily News Egypt that the feasibility studies are undergoing and “the project is currently in the stage of searching for funding to prepare a detailed feasibility study to choose the best alternatives between the shipping lane and multi-modal transport.”
Ghanem noted: “All the Nile basin countries are included in the project.”
The Nile Basin includes 11 countries: Eritrea, Uganda, Ethiopia, Sudan, South Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, Tanzania, Rwanda, Kenya, and Egypt.
In a statement on Saturday, the minister said that the project “includes a navigation corridor, a road, a railway, an electrical connection and an information cable to achieve the comprehensive development of the Nile Basin countries.”
