High Grand Falls Dam construction project that will cost billions and was initiated a decade ago has foreseen a major milestone as the Government of Kenya just recently signed the very first agreement with a construction firm situated in Britain that has been awarded the contract. The contract was signed between National Irrigation Authority and GBM engineering firm and has thus allowed the project contractor to set up a camp in the counties of Tharaka and Kitui where the construction project is located.
The assigned contractor has been granted a period of six months to finish ground mapping and do the updates on all the technical and social data in order to determine the total number of households that are going to be affected during the execution of the actual scope of the High Grand Falls Dam project work.
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The contractor GBM, will take full responsibility of the design, funding, construction and the operation of the overall High Grand Falls project for years in order to recover the costs. This simply shows that the Government of Kenya will not provide any sort of funding in the Public Private Partnership.
High Grand Falls Dam Project Cost and Capacity
The High Grand Falls Dam project is expected to cost approximately Ksh425 billion. The dam will be the second largest freshwater dam in Africa after Aswan Dam on the Nile. The dam will be the largest single project of the Kenyan government as it will go at a cost higher than the Standard Gauge Railway construction project.
The dam will have a potential water provision capacity of over 5600 million cubic meters of water that will be utilized in the irrigation development sector of 400,000 hectares of land. Moreover, it will have a potential capacity of generating around 1,000MW of power.
Other functions of the High Grand Falls Dam will include flood control, ecotourism uses, aquaculture and general improvement of the livelihood in the region it is located and the country at large.
