By GNA Feature Yussif Ibrahim, GNA
Kumasi, Sept. 02, GNA – In a modest conference room at the Doxa Court Hotel in Bolgatanga, 21 people from two countries sat down to confront a problem that respects no border: a river that has, for years, brought both life and devastation to the communities along its banks.
The White Volta, known in Burkina Faso as the Nakambé, begins its journey from the north of the border and flows into Ghana, carrying with it not just water, but risk.
When Burkina Faso’s Bagre Dam releases excess water, the surge travels downstream into Ghana’s Upper East, North East and Northern Regions, often with little warning. The result? Villages flood, farms destroyed, lives lost.
The meeting, convened under the Adaptation and Vulnerability-Strengthening Trans-disciplinary Engagement for Climate Resilience (AV-STEC) project, brought together scientists, government officials, disaster management officers and traditional authority representatives from Ghana and Burkina Faso to ask a hard question: after years of goodwill and good intentions, why does the warning system still fail the people who need it most?
Why AV-STEC exists
Since 1999, the annual release of excess water from Burkina Faso’s Bagre Dam, commissioned in 1992, has battered communities downstream in Ghana.
Under the pressure of erratic rainfall and a changing climate, what was a necessary safety measure for the dam has become an increasingly, destructive annual ritual.
The overflow from the White Volta floods more than two dozen districts across several regions each year, wrecking farmland and infrastructure and displacing thousands.
AV-STEC was Designed to Break That Cycle
The project is jointly implemented by the Centre for Biodiversity Conservation Research (CBCR) in Ghana and Naturama in Burkina Faso, in partnership with York University in Canada and the START International/Stolkholm Environment Institute.
It combines nature-based solutions, vulnerability assessments, improved localised climate information and stakeholder engagement to build resilience in flood-prone communities on both sides of the border.
The project is funded through the Climate Adaptation and Resilience (CLARE) Initiative, supported by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC).
The Bolgatanga meeting itself grew out of that mandate, a recommendation from AV-STEC’s technical research teams that policymakers from both countries needed to work together.
A River Getting Angrier
The scientific presentations set an urgent tone.
Climate projections shared at the meeting suggest Northern Ghana’s future will not simply be wetter or drier, but hotter, more unpredictable, and more prone to compounding disasters.
Hydrological modelling of the Nakambé watershed pointed to an intensification of floods and droughts alike in the coming decades, particularly under high-emissions climate scenarios.
Socio-economic research presented at the gathering added a human face to the data: households headed by people aged 60 and above were found to be disproportionately vulnerable to climate shocks, a finding that speaks to the elderly farmers and grandparents who often bear the heaviest burden when floodwaters rise with little notice.
When the Warning Doesn’t Arrive
If there was a single thread running through the day’s discussions, it was this: the technology and science to predict floods exist, but the information often does not reach the people living along the water path in time.
Participants, working in English and Francophone groups, mapped out the issues in painstaking detail.
Early warning messages move too slowly.
District assemblies lack transport and fuel to physically reach remote communities.
Agencies holding forecast data do not always talk to the disaster responders on the ground, and even when warnings do arrive, some communities have grown weary of false alarms and ignore them – a dangerous complacency in a region where the next flood could be the worst yet.
On the Burkina Faso side, the group’s diagnosis was sharper still: unchecked settlement along the riverbanks, weak coordination between institutions, and populations that have not been brought fully into flood preparedness planning.
The proposed remedies were practical rather than grand — better-resourced community information centres, trained disaster volunteers, WhatsApp and SMS alert systems, more weather stations, and stronger enforcement against communities settling in flood-prone buffer zones.
Building the Missing Bridge
But perhaps the most consequential conversation of the day happened after the group work ended, when talk turned to the machinery of cooperation itself.
Mr. Ernest Sanou, Chief Hydrologist at Burkina Faso’s national utility SONABEL, revealed a telling gap: letters seeking closer coordination with Ghana’s Volta River Authority, sent as far back as October 2025, had gone unanswered.
It was a small but pointed illustration of how trans-boundary cooperation can stall — not for lack of will at the community level, but for lack of a reliable channels at the top.
Participants converged on a solution that had eluded the two countries for years: a formal “Bagre-Kompienga Release Protocol”, built on real-time data sharing and pre-agreed spill thresholds, so that a release upstream triggers an automatic, predictable chain of warnings downstream, rather than a scramble after the water is already moving.
Mr. Cedric Dzelu, representing Ghana’s Minister of State for Climate Change and Sustainability, committed to briefing the Minister with a recommendation to convene a high-level ministerial meeting between the two countries that will commit to sustain political momentum.
Ms. Tiaho Cecile of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Burkina Faso, confirmed her country’s Water Minister was equally invested, noting that bilateral engagements had already taken place in October 2025 and February 2026.
Professor Christopher Gordon of the University of Ghana distilled the way forward into three tiers that must move together: a high-level ministerial meeting to provide political weight, technical working groups to keep the science and data flowing, and direct engagement between grassroots communities and farmers on both sides of the border, who ultimately live with the consequences of decisions made far upstream.
A River That Demands Neighbours Act Like Neighbours
Emerita Professor Yaa Ntiamoa-Baidu, Chair of the Centre for Biodiversity Conservation Research and the project’s principal investigator, struck a note of cautious optimism, as the meeting closed.
The project, she said, had the ingredients for real impact, but only if the three levels of engagement agreed upon in Bolgatanga were actually convened.
That is the test now facing both governments.
The White Volta will keep rising and falling with the rains, indifferent to the line on the map that separates Ghana from Burkina Faso.
Whether the next flood arrives as a catastrophe or a manageable event may depend less on the river itself, and more on whether the commitments made around a hotel conference table in Bolgatanga translate into a phone call, a data feed, and a warning that reaches a farmer’s radio in time.
GNA
Edited by Kwabia Owusu-Mensah/Benjamin Mensah
Writer: Yussif Ibrahim
Writer’s email address: [email protected]