Grand Inga -- The World Bank's Latest Silver Bullet for Africa

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"Close to 600 million peoplein sub-Saharan Africa live in a state of permanent power outage. It is tempting to provide electricity to so many people with one ambitious silver bullet. The Grand Inga Dam would divert the Congo River near its mouth and, according to its promoters, meet the electricity needs of more than 500 million people. With a capacity of 40,000 megawatts, the scheme would be the world's largest hydropower project."

"The enthusiasm of the World Bank and other funders for mega-dams has a long history. Over the past 40 years, donors have poured billions of dollars intodams and associated transmission lineson the Congo River. The projects have been plagued by rampant corruption, perform far below capacity, and have failed to benefit the poor. About 85 percent of the electricity in the DRC is consumed by the mining industry, while only 6 to 9 percent of the population has access to electricity. Worse, the centralized nature of these investments has created a winner-takes-all system that has encouraged tension and civil war."

Read more @http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-bosshard/grand-inga-the-world-bank_b_3308223.html

3 Answers

  2. I wonder if there are others in the group with similar experiences. Would you care to share?

  3. hope they don't ruin this project now. Access to electricity is important for poor but lets see what percentage reached to poor from this project. World bank is involved so hope it will be better scenario this time. Kiran, I worked in Africa for some time and as you said civil war can happen if poor situation continues for some more time.