Articles / world

Half a billion people share the Nile basin

نصف مليار إنسان يتقاسمون حوض النيل

2026-07-26

Around half a billion people live in the eleven countries of the Nile basin, from Burundi's hills to Egypt's delta. By mid-century the basin's population is projected to approach 800 million or more.

The river, meanwhile, stays the same size. Egypt and Sudan depend on it almost completely; Ethiopia, holding the Blue Nile's headwaters, generates most of the flow and historically used the least of it. The dam negotiations everyone reads about are, underneath, demographic arithmetic.

Water talks are population talks wearing an engineering costume. The numbers on this site are one way to read them.