Ethiopia–Kenya border

Wells and grazing lands

From the Somali tripoint the border follows the bed of the Daua River for about 120 miles, then runs in straight lines from hilltop to hilltop and crosses Lake Rudolf for about 24 miles; its tripoint with Sudan northwest of the lake was never finally fixed. A British official, Captain Maud, surveyed the frontier in 1902, and his line became the basis of the Anglo-Ethiopian agreement of 1907. Because it cut across traditional grazing areas, another line was proposed in 1908, but Ethiopia did not accept it.^[1]

A 1947 agreement proposed a new line, drawn well by well: Godoma and El Guda to Ethiopia, Uran and Waiye to Kenya, and the line running down the valley between the two Moyales. A commission marked it in 1951–55, but Ethiopia refused to ratify the result. After Kenya’s independence the two states adjusted it in 1963, and a treaty of 9 June 1970 set the present boundary.^[1]

Moyale

A highway corridor of about 895 kilometres, co-funded by the African Development Bank, now links Kenya and Ethiopia through Moyale; the bank said the trip from Nairobi to Moyale fell from three days to less than one.^[3] In December 2020 Kenya’s president and Ethiopia’s prime minister opened a one-stop border post at Moyale, a market town of fewer than 40,000 people roughly halfway between the two capitals. Cross-border violence has long hurt trade there: in 2018 dozens were killed in clashes between ethnic Somalis and Oromos, and thousands of Ethiopians fled into Kenya during another outbreak involving the Ethiopian military.^[2]

“We want to see Moyale becoming the Dubai of this whole region”^[2]