Protecting Africa’s great river basins is at the heart of The Wilderness Project, which surveys the Okavango, Zambezi, Nile, and Congo basins in unprecedented detail.
Protecting Africa’s great river basins, for The Wilderness Project founder Steve Boyes, starts with a basic problem: much of this territory has never been scientifically documented. The four basins supply freshwater to nearly half a billion people and sustain some of the planet’s most biodiverse ecosystems. Yet, major stretches of their source regions remained essentially unmapped until Boyes launched what became the Great Spine of Africa expedition series in 2022, building on earlier work through the National Geographic Okavango Wilderness Project.
The scale of what expedition teams have covered is substantial. Boyes and his collaborators have traversed more than 30,000 kilometers of rivers, much of it never previously surveyed by scientists, traveling in traditional dugout canoes, custom-built craft for turbulent water, and on foot where rivers become too narrow or dangerous to navigate. The project has completed roughly 20 expeditions this year with plans to reach 25 next year, working toward a stated goal of protecting 1.2 million square kilometers of African watersheds, plateaus, and rivers by 2035.
The findings have already reshaped basic geography. A 2015 expedition tracing the Okavango Delta’s source led Boyes to the Angolan Highlands, previously the largest unstudied river basin on the planet.
Subsequent research on protecting Africa’s great river basins confirmed that the actual source of the Zambezi River sits in that same highland plateau, a boundless catchment that receives intense seasonal rainfall and discharges roughly 423 cubic kilometers of water annually into downstream systems, more than double Europe’s total annual water usage, feeding not just the Zambezi but the Okavango, Cuando, Congo, Cuanza, and Cunene rivers as well. Researchers also identified peatlands there as Africa’s second-largest, functioning as a slow-release water reservoir during dry seasons, much like glaciers elsewhere.
The project’s theory of change combines rigorous baseline science with storytelling by a new generation of African narrators, aiming to provide policymakers with evidence to inform protection decisions while building public support for action. Boyes presented findings on the Angolan highlands’ Lisima Lya Mwono landscape at the 2025 Ramsar Convention in Zimbabwe, seeking recognition as a wetland of international importance, exactly the kind of formal designation that can constrain future development.
Protecting Africa’s great river basins combines rigorous baseline science with storytelling from a new generation of African narrators, as Boyes presented findings on Angola’s Lisima Lya Mwono landscape at the 2025 Ramsar Convention, seeking recognition as a wetland of international importance. Photo courtesy of The Wilderness Project.
But formal designations and scientific baselines carry limited weight against the infrastructure and geopolitical pressures already reshaping these same basins. The Nile illustrates the gap starkly. Ethiopia inaugurated the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in 2025, Africa’s largest hydropower project, built on the Blue Nile roughly 14 kilometers from Sudan’s border.
Egypt, which depends on the Nile for about 90% of its water, has spent over a decade in unresolved negotiations with Ethiopia and Sudan, with no binding agreement yet governing how the dam’s reservoir and Egypt’s own Aswan High Dam will jointly manage the river through future droughts. The dispute spans 11 countries that share the Nile Basin and has already involved competing diplomatic campaigns for regional support.
The Congo basin faces its own contested infrastructure ambitions. Plans for the massive Inga III expansion on the Congo River, which could theoretically power much of sub-Saharan Africa, remain stalled by political instability, financing gaps, and unresolved environmental review, a reminder that even projects with genuine development potential can sit in limbo for decades without the kind of coordinated basin-wide governance that The Wilderness Project’s scientific baselines on protecting Africa’s great river basins are ultimately meant to inform.
Boyes’s earlier Okavango research helped secure UNESCO World Heritage status for the delta in 2014 and documented more than 140 new species, outcomes that shaped real protective designations.
Protecting Africa’s great river basins can yield concrete conservation wins, as Steve Boyes’s earlier Okavango research demonstrated by documenting more than 140 new species and contributing directly to the delta securing UNESCO World Heritage status in 2014, turning scientific fieldwork into enforceable protective designations. Photo courtesy of The Wilderness Project.
But translating river-basin science into enforceable protection against hydropower ambitions backed by national governments and billions in infrastructure financing is a fundamentally different and slower undertaking than running an expedition, one that depends on transboundary political cooperation; the surveys themselves have no power to compel.
Protecting Africa’s great river basins, as The Wilderness Project frames its mission, depends on treating documentation as a first step rather than an endpoint. The organization’s storytelling and science can shift public awareness and give negotiators better information. Whether Egypt, Ethiopia, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, along with dozens of other basin states, ultimately manage these rivers cooperatively or competitively will be decided in political negotiations far removed from a dugout canoe on the Cuito River, no matter how thorough the science collected along the way.
