New Water Policy and Practice Volume 1, Number 1 - Fall 2014 | Page 11

New Water Policy and Practice

tions such as the World Bank declined substantially. But impacts can also be demonstrated at a more local scale with individual
projects. A useful example, because it has
been well publicized and is relatively well
documented, is that of the Bujagali dam in
Uganda whose construction was delayed
for over five years by northern-based environmental activists in which McCully’s IRN
played a leading role.

The dam was the intervention chosen at the turn of the century as the best
alternative for Uganda to meet its growing
power needs. It has a small physical footprint because it is essentially a run-of-river
installation, a few kilometers downstream
of the existing hydropower installations at
Owen Falls, which regulate the flow from
Lake Victoria into the Nile River. Claims
by campaigners that thousands of people
would be displaced by the project turned out
to include mainly those displaced by power
line construction rather than the dam itself.
Just a handful of local farmers used land in
the few hundred hectares of the valley to be
flooded, although some households were
relocated to provide land to establish construction and administration facilities.

When the project was initiated in
2001 with a target date for completion of
2005, Uganda was already facing critical energy shortages. The project was delayed by
a succession of procedural complaints and
only finally commissioned in 2012. Already,
in 2007, the World Bank had noted that

Kiira dam complex, and will re-use the
upstream water releases. When commissioned, the proposed project will
produce power at a fraction of the cost
Uganda is now paying for the supply
from thermal power plants running on
imported fuel.” (World Bank 2007)

By the time the project was finally
commissioned, seven years late in 2012, the
considerable damage done to the Ugandan
economy had been well documented. With
the insights provided by Briscoe 2010b, the
delay could clearly be attributed to externally driven anti-dam campaigns. In turn, the
delay in meeting the country’s electricity
needs contributed to slower economic and
employment growth (See, for instance, IMF
2007; Uganda BoS 2011). Given the demonstrable links between unemployment and
poverty (wage earners’ incomes were significantly higher than subsistence incomes
(Ellis and Bahiigwa 2003)) and between
poverty and child mortality (“Infant mortality is found to be almost 80% higher for
the poorest 20% compared with the richest
20%” (MFPED 2002)), it can be concluded
that the delays in completing Bujagali contributed to some thousands of additional
child deaths in the country.

Can the achievements of the campaigners be balanced against childrens’ lives?
Were the lives lost perhaps outweighed by
benefits, such as a more careful approach to
dam building, accrued in other cases? This
calculus is unlikely ever to be made; the
point however is that it cannot be assumed
that campaigns of this nature and the scholarship that is mobilized to support them are
without consequence.

The opposition to dams has developed a number of lines of critique aside
from specific allegations of corruption, displacement of people without compensation,
and environmental damage. A particular fo-

“…… if the Bujagali project had been
successfully financed in 2002, Uganda
would have been able to avoid the current economic penalties. Moreover, the
reductions in Lake Victoria water levels
from over-abstraction for hydropower
production may not have occurred.
This is because the Bujagali project is
downstream of the current Nalubaale/
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