Delay on DR Congo's Inga 3 Dam

Construction on the massive Inga 3 dam, which is expected to produce 4,800 megawatts of power for the Democratic Republic of Congo, won’t begin until 2017 at the earliest. This is according to a Thursday statement by the World Bank and signals a fresh delay in the project.

“Work should get underway in 2017,” said the World Bank’s DR Congo manager Ahmadou Moustapha Ndiaye. “there are still a lot of technical questions to be resolved,”

These statements underscore the fact that the timing of dam completion remains provisional. Last year Ndaiye’s organization approved $73 million to support the multi-billion dollar Inga 3 dam on the Congo River.

The Congo, Africa’s most powerful river, is already a major producer of hydroelectric power. The Inga 3, however, would be the largest yet. The Inga 3 Basse Chute project near Matadi would divert water from the Congo River into a 12-kilometer channel and then pass the water through a 100-meter high dam with hydroelectric turbines and back into the river. The intake would be above the existing Inga 1 and Inga 2 dams, and outflow downstream from both.

The new date for work commencement pushes back a schedule of late 2016, which the World Bank announced last year. That previous timetable was already a year later than earlier government projections that construction would begin this year.