CAIRO — The Egyptian Ministry of Water and Irrigation announced in an Oct. 18 press statement that an Egyptian delegation had verified that no water is yet stored in the Renaissance Dam and that there is nothing obstructing the Nile. The statement followed the Oct. 17 visit of the group, headed by Minister of Water and Irrigation Mohamed Abdel Aty, to the Renaissance Dam in Ethiopia near the Sudanese border. It was the first visit of its kind by an Egyptian state official.

Atiya Issawi, who covers African affairs for Al-Ahram newspaper, said that the visit was intended to dispel Egyptian doubts about the Renaissance Dam amid the faltering negotiations and Ethiopia’s moving forward on its construction. He told Al-Monitor, “The Ethiopian government’s invitation to Egypt and its technical delegation to visit the dam shows that tensions between the two countries have eased, relatively,” adding that the Ethiopian move was meant to convey good will.

Egypt is concerned about the dam's potential negative effects on its water share of the Nile River (55.5 billion cubic meters annually, as stipulated in the 1929 and 1959 agreements), especially while the dam is being filled. Ethiopia has not announced a start date for that stage, but it is expected to begin in early 2018. The dam will have a storage capacity of 74 billion cubic meters, equal to the annual shares of Egypt and Sudan combined.

Ethiopia is still building the dam it started working on in April 2011. The goal is to generate more than 6,450 megawatts of hydroelectric power, the biggest hydroelectric project in Africa, at a cost of $4.2 billion.