Dams, health, and livelihoods in Africa: Lessons from the senegal, suggestions for Ethiopia

Efforts in previous decades, largely culminating in the release of the World Commission on Dams Report, have engendered a more circumspect approach to dam construction and management - one which incorporates consideration for the environment, health, equity, stakeholders, and livelihoods. Such integration nevertheless often remains at a qualitative level, preventing tangible incorporation of these factors into Decision Support Tools (DST) for water management at a basin or sub-basin level. This paper uses the experience of the Senegal River Basin (SRB) to generate suggestions for how public health and smallholder livelihood concerns can be explicitly and quantitatively incorporated into operations decisions of the Koka dam in Ethiopia. The study examines the operational tradeoffs made among livelihoods, health, and more conventional water needs such as irrigation and hydropower in SRB water management strategies over the last two decades. The examination of these tradeoffs is used to produce general lessons and specific suggestions that are applied to the operations of the Koka reservoir in Ethiopia. Copyright ASCE 2006.