A decades-old conflict between Cairo and Addis Ababa intensified this month as Ethiopian leaders pledged to advance three new Blue Nile hydropower dams. 

Ethiopia’s Ministry of Water and Energy announced in March that it was reviving plans for three hydropower dams along the Blue Nile. The three dams — Karadobi, Mandaya and Beko Abo — planned upstream from the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) are projected to generate about 5,700 megawatts combined, slightly more than the GERD’s installed capacity of 5,150 MW. 

Tensions escalated this month when Ethiopian Minister of Water and Energy Habtamu Itefa and Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty reasserted their governments’ competing claims. Egypt’s state-owned outlet MENA first reported on the dispute Aug. 16, citing Ethiopian officials who asserted “control” over water resources and full rights to build new dams. In an Aug. 20 interview with Al Arabiya, Abdelatty emphasized that no further unilateral dam construction would be tolerated. Itefa was equally firm in an Aug. 20 interview with Ethiopian government-affiliated outlet Pulse of Africa, saying Addis Ababa built the GERD “without the permission” of Cairo and would keep building “whenever the needs arise.”

The dispute traces back to Ethiopia’s 2011 unilateral decision to build the GERD and to competing claims over Nile water rights. Cairo cites colonial-era agreements from 1929 and 1959 that granted Egypt and Sudan a majority share of the river’s flow; Ethiopia, which was not party to either agreement, has long rejected them as illegitimate. Years of talks mediated by the African Union and the United States have failed to produce a binding deal. The GERD began full operation in September 2025.