Twelve nations spanning three of Africa's great river basins signed an accord in Nairobi committing their hydrological services to a single shared data platform — real-time flow, abstraction and reservoir levels, visible to every signatory. It is the kind of unglamorous agreement that specialists insist matters more than dams: you cannot manage what upstream neighbours will not let you see.
The accord's origins are pragmatic. Two near-miss disputes over reservoir drawdowns in recent drought years convinced governments that opacity was the accelerant. The treaty's designers borrowed from aviation rather than diplomacy: continuous telemetry, shared standards, and an incident-review process that assigns learning rather than blame.
Implementation now depends on sensors, satellites and, above all, trust. Donor agencies have committed funding for gauging stations in under-monitored tributaries, and the platform's first public dashboard is promised within a year. Veteran water negotiators are cautiously optimistic — noting that states which share data have historically found it much harder to escalate against each other.