Beautifying Sheger River Development Project — Addis Ababa's Contested Riverside Greening Programme

Launched in 2019, the Beautifying Sheger (Ye Sheger Šimagle) project is a City of Addis Ababa riverside-development programme covering an announced 69 km of the Sheger river system, running from the Entoto mountains through the city to the Akaki river, in an area home to over 1.3 million residents. Financing was coordinated through the African Development Bank's Urban and Municipal Development Fund, drawing on Italian, Chinese and Korean development-agency support and UN-Habitat.

Public and donor communications describe plans for cleaned and dredged riverbeds, new sewerage and drainage to replace direct waste discharge, stormwater retention ponds on tributaries to reduce peak flooding, and new parks and walkways along the watercourses, alongside livelihood alternatives for residents currently dependent on the rivers.

A critical review found the delivered scope fell well short of the concept: aside from concrete embankments, "the proposed ideas in the concept note...are not being implemented," with sewer and stormwater outlets still emptying directly into riverbeds rather than being diverted as planned. The original design was also replaced mid-project by a Chinese landscape architect's plan under an EPC contract structure that the review says reduced Ethiopian professionals to consultants and left "local input to a minimum," with no meaningful public-participation process in design or implementation.

Neither the promotional materials nor the critical review we found publish quantified before/after results (hectares greened, flood-days avoided, biodiversity counts); displacement of riverside residents and gardeners is acknowledged in principle but not quantified. We therefore treat this as a large, internationally financed but weakly evidenced and contested urban-greening programme, useful mainly as a documented cautionary case on the gap between announced river-greening scope and verified delivery.

Read the full analysis: https://www.wcscd.com/onlinejournal/the-danger-of-ambition-and-neglect-the-case-of-beautifying-sheger