Research Article
Estimation of Current Water Use over the Complex
Topography of the Nile Basin Headwaters: The
Case of Ghba Subbasin, Ethiopia
Mehari Gebreyohannes Hiben ,
1,2
Admasu Gebeyehu Awoke,
1
and Abraha Adugna Ashenafi
3
1
School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa Institute of Technology (AAiT),
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
2
MG Water Resources Consultancy Firm, Mekelle, Tigray, Ethiopia
3
Ministry of Water and Energy, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Correspondence should be addressed to Mehari Gebreyohannes Hiben; hiben123@gmail.com
Received 26 April 2022; Revised 3 July 2022; Accepted 11 July 2022; Published 8 August 2022
Academic Editor: Yizi Shang
Copyright © 2022 Mehari Gebreyohannes Hiben et al. is is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons
Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is
properly cited.
Quantifying the available and useable water is critical work in any water resource study and design project. However, it is
challenging to provide a robust and accurate estimation of water use and distribution for better water resource management and
planning. is study aims to estimate the water use by different sectors, including water supply and irrigation sectors, by adopting
estimated demand and supply water quantity. e current total population of the subbasin has been estimated to be 1.21 million.
us, in the subbasin, current water use is estimated as follows: domestic and nondomestic water use in the rural area is 3.5 Mm
3
/
year and 0.174 Mm
3
/year, respectively. e domestic water use of the towns is 12.77 Mm
3
/year. e industrial water use of the
urban areas is 21.2 Mm
3
/year, whereas the commercial, public, and institutional water use are 1.87 Mm
3
/year. e real loss for all
the water supply uses is 7.8 Mm
3
/year. us, the total current water supply uses are about 47.225 Mm
3
/year. From the existing
irrigation schemes, about 10,254.8 ha areas are irrigated by both smallholders and different investors, growing vegetables, cereals,
and fruit trees. e annual irrigation water requirements of these schemes are computed to be 151.55 Mm
3
. Livestock water
demand of the subbasin was assessed and estimated based on the population and consumption rates of the species. Currently, the
subbasin has a total livestock population of 1,527,835, and the water demand of which is estimated at 5.3 Mm
3
per annum. Hence,
the total current water use estimate of the subbasin is 204.1 Mm
3
.
1. Introduction
e rapid growth of the population is causing an alarming
demand increase in freshwater resources (e.g., lakes, rivers)
of the world [1–3]. Continuously people who are living in
different states or even within the same boundary are cre-
ating conflicts over water that they withdraw from common
sources, often and even decades pass by, but such water
disputes are not resolved [4, 5]. Water use is often metered in
all other sectors except in the agricultural sector. In this
paper, we examined a case study of current water use
estimates in the Ghba subbasin using geographical infor-
mation system (GIS) and collected data. Several studies, e.g.,
[6–8], have applied the same techniques for the estimation of
agricultural water use using GIS and collected data.
Before the assessment, the study briefly reviewed FDRE
Constitution [9], Water Resources Management Policy [10],
Water Resources Management Proclamation [10], Water
Resources Management Regulations [10], Nile Basin Ini-
tiative Reports [11], Central Statistical Agency Reports
forecasted the population of Ethiopia from 2014 to 2017 [12],
and another related strategic document of water resource
Hindawi
Advances in Civil Engineering
Volume 2022, Article ID 7852100, 14 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/7852100