Nation-building is a crucial project that requires the services of many actors to achieve. It embodies such elements as national integration, poverty reduction through employment generation, robust economic development through industrialisation, as well as infrastructural revolution through good governance. The actors involved in it have different and very important roles to play. Fortunately, over the years in the Nile River Basin, the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) an intergovernmental partnership of Nile Basin countries, aims to ensure that Nile Basin countries work together to unlock the huge potential in order to bring a vast range of benefits to Nile Basin citizens including increased hydropower, food production, improved management of watersheds and better access to water for domestic use, among others. Against this backdrop, the paper asked: what roles did the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) played in the overall project of nation-building in the Nile River Basin? Using Ethiopia as a case of study, this paper discovered that the NBI programs have contributed immensely towards nation building, which generated a swathe of shared benefits, transforming lives in Ethiopia.

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