The Nile Project University Program offers a variety of activities to provide students with the necessary skills to manage and carry out conservation projects in three main areas: water, energy and food. So far it has worked with student volunteers at six universities in five Nile Basin countries: Egypt, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania.

“The project is based on volunteering and team work to provide volunteers with skills contributing to building their personality and expanding their awareness of volunteerism, community service and the preservation of the Nile water,” said Areeg Hisham of Nahdet el Mahrousa, a Cairo-based nongovernmental organization that is coordinating the university program, which is funded by the Drosos Foundation .

Egypt relies on the Nile River for about 90 percent of its freshwater needs, according to the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based non-governmental research center. However, as Ethiopia nears completion of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, a huge hydroelectric facility on the Blue Nile, which is the main supplier of the Nile waters reaching Egypt, officials in Cairo fear that a natural resource crisis is looming for Egypt.

The process of filling the vast reservoir behind the dam is expected to reduce the flow of the river, which Egypt’s government says will threaten millions of Egyptian farmers as well as food supplies in the country. Egypt and Ethiopia have for years tried to reach an agreement on how quickly to fill the reservoir. Addis Ababa proposes filling it over three years, while Egypt prefers to do so over 15 years, afraid of the impact on its water needs.

Egypt is already below the global “water poverty” line and is approaching the threshold the United Nations defines as “absolute scarcity.” (See a related article, “Water is Scarce in Egypt; So Are Research Funds.”)

“We currently have a water deficit of 42 billion cubic meters per year,” said Nader Noureddine, a professor of soil and water resources at Cairo University. “Egypt is supposed to have 104 billion cubic meters to be classified above the water poverty line, but we have only 62 billion, of which 55.5 billion cubic meters comes from the Nile,” he added.

Tons of Trash in the River

The Nile Project University Program reaches students informally, as all its activities are conducted outside universities and are advertised on social media. Over the course of two years, it has provided training in various volunteer activities to 183 male and female students in Egypt in the governorates between Cairo and Aswan, through which the Nile River passes. The students have participated in more than 20 civil-society initiatives to promote social responsibility toward the river.

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One of those projects focused on cleaning a section of the Nile in the Agouza district, in the center of Cairo. The students lifted about 10 tons of garbage from the Nile and conducted outreach campaigns for citizens in the surrounding areas, teaching them about the dangers of dumping waste into the Nile water.

The program also launched an initiative to supply safe drinking water sources to areas lacking them. One effort created a clean public water source feeding two villages in the center of Ausim, to the north of the Giza governorate. Volunteers installed water filters, planted trees in neglected streets, set up school gardens and distributed outreach books to students in the schools.