The incredible £15bn man-made African river mega-project that’s one of the world’s biggest

Many countries in have long suffered from a due to their shortage of natural reserves such as rivers.

All the way back in the 1960s, one such country, , tried to tackle the water issue through desalination.

With the commencement of the regime of Muammar Gaddafi in 1969, the Libyan government pivoted its attention to transporting deep aquifers in the southern regions of the country to the coastal area, where the majority of Libyans live.

This led to the conception of the Great Man-Made River (GMMR), a massive engineering plan believed to be the world’s largest .

The budget estimate for the GMMR claimed to have been between $20 billion and $25 billion (£15.7bn and £19.6bn), although the exact amount spent remains unclear.

Gaddafi, who laid the foundation stone for the commencement of the construction of the project in August 1984, hailed the GMMR the “eighth Wonder of the World”.

Using a pipeline system pumping fossil water from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System into the populous cities on the coast, the GMMR currently covers a distance of up to 994 miles.

It is said to provide 70% of all freshwater used in Libya.

The underground network of pipes and aqueducts includes 1,300 wells, many of which are deeper than 1,640 feet (500 metres) underground.

One billion euros (£824 million in today’s money) was also invested in the project for the installation of 50,000 artificial palm trees for water condensation, a project carried out by the Spanish engineer Antonio Ibanez de Alba, according to a article from 1990.

The network of pipes supplying fresh water through Libya has so far been developed in three phases.

Further stages of the project are set to be constructed, including an extension of the networks created during the first phase as well as a pipeline connecting the systems during phases one and two.

The completion of these phases could bring the total capacity of the GMMR to the delivery of 230 million cubic feet of water per day and would include 2,500 miles of pipelines.

The pipes themselves have been tipped to be record-breaking. The 250,000 sections of pipe laid during the first phase of the project reportedly had a diameter of four metres and a length of seven metres, the largest in the world at the time.

The size of the underground reservoirs has led some Libyan officials to claim the GMMR could supply water for thousands of years if the 2007 rates of retrieval are not increased, but critics believe similar claims are greatly overstated.

During the Second Libyan Civil War (2014-20), the water infrastructure suffered neglect and occasional breakdowns. As of July 2019, 101 of 479 wells on the western pipeline system had been dismantled.

Then, in April 2020, a station controlling water flow to Tripoli and neighboring towns was seized by an unknown armed group. The flow of water was cut to over two million people and the attack was condemned by the on humanitarian grounds.