The fate of the controversial power plant at Bujagali Falls in Uganda will depend on the outcome of an ongoing study of all the country's potential hydropower project sites. The World Bank study will seek to establish which projects meet a set of recently adopted standards for funding. The controversial us $500 million Bujagali Falls plant along the River Nile is earmarked for funding from the bank's private sector financing arm, the International Finance Corporation ( ifc ).
The sites, under evaluation by a team of engineering and environment consultants from the Canada-based Acres International, include Bujagali Falls, Karuma Falls, Kalagala Falls, Murchison Falls and Ayago Rapids. The research team held the first of a series of seminars for various categories of stakeholders in Kampala. A member of the study team said alternative engineering designs and their potential environmental and social effects for each of the sites are to be analysed. The source said the ifc is shifting emphasis to issues of resettlement of displaced people, cultural property, wetlands and forests, among other considerations. Bujagali Falls is a particularly contested site, with environmentalists lobbying against the construction of a hydropower dam
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