So would the World Bank today lend money for an Aswan dam if it did not already exist?

ECONOMIST: Small projects often give better returns

Egypt, for instance, seems to be stuck with the catastrophic Aswan dam, which is holding back the Nile's silt.

ECONOMIST: Water

For thousands of years, the sitting figure of Ramses II watched over the Nil, till the construction of the Aswan dam threatened to drown the ancient temple under the waters of the river.

UNESCO: Culture

Thus the cold war spread to north Africa and Egypt (the Russians duly stepped in to finance the Aswan dam, and much else), and Israel became ever more closely tied to the United States.

ECONOMIST: The Suez crisis

Or take the Aswan High Dam in Egypt, an unmitigated disaster, according to ecologists.

FORBES: The Story Of Eau

Jelal is a Nubian, one of the people who lived in southernmost Egypt and northern Sudan until the 1960s, when the Aswan High Dam flooded their land.

BBC: The perfect trip: Egypt

The historical Nubian Temples campaign, for the protection of the Egyptian monuments in Nubia from the rising waters of the Aswan High Dam, mobilized the international community for the protection of the World Heritage.

UNESCO: 70 Years

They added that since the completion of the Aswan High Dam, Egypt's population had doubled, calorie intake and meat consumption had risen by more than a third, and the use of fertilisers had increased four-fold.

BBC: Egyptian farmers (Getty Images)

The Aswan high dam, for example, is often cited as a cautionary example, a quixotic construction that now reduces the mighty Nile to a dribble before it trickles to the sea, leaving behind an explosion of water hyacinth, outbreaks of bilharzia, polluted irrigation channels and a build-up of sediment inland that would otherwise compensate for coastal erosion from Egypt to Lebanon.

ECONOMIST: Small projects often give better returns