Lake Victoria: The Mother of the Nile

Abstract

Lake Victoria (Fig. 4.1a), the world's third largest lake and the largest in the developing world, is ideally the "mother of the Nile" given the seasonality characteristics of the Blue Nile. It is the source of the White Nile (see Fig. 2.4), which flows from Jinja in Uganda (Fig. 4.1b) to join the Blue Nile (see Chap. 2) in Khartoum (Sudan) to form one Nile and provides water for irrigation, transport, domestic and livestock uses, and supports the livelihood of more than 76 million people who live around it [6,12, 17]. The presentation of this book, therefore, would not be complete without a special coverage of the Lake, which is so vital to the entire Nile River Basin (NRB). Nicholson [14,15] documents its significance as an indicator of environmental and climate change over long-term scales. Since the 1960s, the lake level has experienced significant fluctuation, see e.g., [14,15], which impacts on the overall water budget of the Nile. From 2001 to 2006, for example, its water level showed a dramatic fall that alarmed water resource managers as to whether the lake was actually drying up [21]. Kull [13] reported that the lake's levels fell by more than 1.1 m below the 10 year average. This chapter presents the Lake and its challenges, which are significant for the overal Nile waters. A more detailed elaborate coverage of this precious lake, its potentials and challenges are presented in the books of Awange [6,12].