Ethiopia announced on Monday that it has completed the second-year filling target of its disputed Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), a minister said according to Reuters.
“The second filling of the Renaissance dam has been completed and the water is overflowing,” Seleshi Bekele, Ethiopia’s minister for water, irrigation and energy said on Monday.
“It means we have now the needed volume of the water to run the two turbines,” he said in a Tweet.
Earlier on Monday, state-run Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation reported that the second round of filling the dam’s reservoir would be “completed in few minutes”.
On 6 July, Ethiopia commenced filling the GERD for the second year without reaching a deal with Egypt and Sudan, a step both downstream states view as necessary to secure their shares of the River Nile.
Talks between the three African countries stalled earlier this year, with both Arab countries blaming Addis Ababa’s “intransigence” for the failure of the negotiations over the past ten years.
