Happy birthday to the Nile!
This year the Nile Basin Initiative celebrates its 20th anniversary. We wish happy birthday to the river and its people with a special episode of the podcast The sources of the Nile, announcing also its second series.
The Nile is not only the longest river in the world, it is estimated to be also one of the oldest: 30 milions years old. The Nile Basin Initiative (NBI), the intergovernmental platform where political and technical dialogue on the river’s waters take place is slighty younger: 20 years old. Still an anniversary worth to be celebrated, that’s why the year 2019 has been declared #YearofNileBasin. Celebrations opened on February 22, the day the NBI was officially established. So, when you are late in wishing happy birthday to a friend, at least you try to make a nice present: we recorded a special episode of the podcast The Sources of the Nile featuring twenty wishes to the river and its people. These voices were recorded in February during the workshop with journalists and researchers organised within the project Open Water Diplomacy.Media, science and transboundary cooperation in the Nile basin, as well as during the Water and Peace Seminar hosted by IHE Delft.

This special episode is also an interlude between the first and the second series of the podcast. We would like to thank all the listeners that took the survey about the podcast. Their answers, feedback and idea have been very helpful to prepare a new series of episodes, coming soon with a new format.
The new episodes will begin by the voice of a researcher sharing some insights and results of our study on narratives and discourses on the Nile in Egyptian, Sudanese, Ethiopian, Ugandan and international media. After that we will invite a practitioner – it could be a journalists or a water diplomat – to comment and maybe challenge the results of the research. The idea is to better understand how news about the Nile are produced, consumed and what impact they might have on water conflict and cooperation. In the final part of the episode we will move beyond the Nile, inviting guests to share experiences from other international river basins, in order to explore how similar narratives and processes unfold in other parts of the world.
Each podcast episode will be also complemented by a blog post in which you will find additional material and references. We hope that the podcast will elicit a conversation and you are warmly invited to share your thoughts and idea by commenting in a forum associated to the blog post.
…while waiting for all these exciting news, we hope you will enjoy this interlude with our wishes for the Nile and its people!
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Emanuele Fantini (April 26, 2019). Happy birthday to the Nile! FLOWs. Retrieved June 20, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/os0q