Massingir Dam in the Limpopo

The spillway repair works on the Massingir dam, a project budgeted at US$60 million, are due to begin next May, said Edgar Chongo, the technician assigned to the Limpopo Basin Management Unit.The contract, awarded to a consortium involving Italian company Cooperativa Muratori and Cementisti (CMC) di Ravenna and South Africa’s WBHO, will take 24 months and its financing is secured with funds from the Mozambique State Budget and the African Development Bank.The project, according to Chongo, essentially aims to ensure the efficient operation of the dam, through large water discharges, whilst taking into account water needs downstream.Chongo also told Mozambican daily newspaper Notícias, that once work was complete conditions would be in place for the viability of the Massingir Agro-Industrial (MAI) project, for irrigation of an area of ​​37 thousand hectares and production of cane sugar in Massingir district.The President of Mozambique recently opened an auxiliary spillway at the dam at a cost of just over US$34 million, which will double previous water flow capacity in the event of floods, to 20,000 cubic metres per second.The Massingir dam, built in the early 1970s, was designed to irrigate an area of ​​about 90 thousand hectares along the Limpopo River valley and to control flooding. Macauhub in its March 27, 2013, edition reported that "work to repair the Massingir dam, in Mozambique’s Gaza province, is expected to cost more than double initial estimates, and will now cost an estimated US$30 million, said Suzana Loforte, the national director for Water."The initial valuation would have been according to this March 2013 article around "US$13 million to replace the infrastructure damaged in May 2008."