By Sjaak Dieleman, Project Consultant GIS/Databases

The Nile River is the longest river in the world. From its most remote headstream originating in the highlands in Burundi, the river flows for approximately 6,670 kilometers (approximately 4,145 miles) until it reaches the Mediterranean Sea in Egypt. The major sources of the Upper Nile are the rainfall over Lake Victoria and the Kagera River, which flows into the lake. The river basin has an area of more than 3,350,000 square kilometers (approximately 1,293,465 square miles). All 10 Nile Basin countries contribute in different manners to the basin and have different needs for the water and other resources of the basin.

Nile Basin Water Resources Project

The Nile Basin Water Resources Project is implemented by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations as part of the Nile Basin Initiative Shared Vision Program (NBI SVP). The project, which is based in Entebbe, Uganda, is in its second phase and comes to a close in June 2003.

"The project has been building capacity in water resources management in the Nile region for the last six years," states Wulf Klohn, project manager, "and has supported the establishment of key technical facilities, the so-called Focal Point Institutions, for water resources management. It has established GIS facilities, upgraded satellite remote sensing equipment, and implemented a limited hydrometeorological monitoring network. Besides this, it has improved communications via the Internet and generally enhanced knowledge about technical, socioeconomic, environmental, legal, and institutional aspects of shared river basins."

Training in Esri GIS in the Nile Region

By the time the project started, there were many different GIS systems used in the various Nile countries, resulting in incompatibility and difficulties in geospatial database compilation for the Nile Basin. In addition, temporal data (hydrometeorological time series) was also stored in various database management systems.

Esri has supported the project in setting up a standard for geospatial data compilation based on Esri's Data Automation Kit, ArcView, and ArcGIS software. Extensive training has been provided by the project GIS experts as well as by the Esri offices in the region to those working in the counterpart ministries. This has resulted in a group of approximately 40 local experts in the Nile Basin countries who are able to handle their geospatial data sets, digitizing, image processing, spatial analysis, and mapping. Data sources include topographic maps, remote sensing images, and internationally available GIS layers.

The temporal data sets in the Nile Basin database have been converted from local database management systems to Microsoft Access, providing the possibility to link this data easily with geospatial data for further analysis.

At the moment, each country is setting up a database for its own portion of the Nile Basin according to uniform naming conventions and database and directory structures designed by the Nile Basin countries and the project. This has resulted in the compilation of geospatial layers of river network; catchment/watershed boundaries; infrastructure and administrative boundaries at scales of 1:50,000, 1:100,000, and 1:250,000; and a uniform relational database with daily hydrometeorological data.

For more information, contact Sjaak Dieleman (e-mail: sdjw@africaonline.co.ug, with an e-mail copy to onmission@lycos.nl).