H1 2026 Evaluation
Angola Reservoir Transparency
F1Opaque — Ranked #158 out of 167 countries
weight 30%
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weight 15%
weight 13%
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weight 8%
weight 5%
Primary source evaluated
Dimension breakdown
Data Availability
20% of total score
Coverage is 0 (no national reservoirs >10 hm³ with public data). Quality dimensions for the COVERED subset are therefore 0 by definition. Original notes preserved below: No public portal publishes current reservoir storage or water levels for any Angolan dam. MINEA's website (minea.gov.ao) contains only construction progress reports and design-capacity figures. PRODEL operates Angola's major hydropower reservoirs (Capanda, Laúca, Cambambe) but publishes no operational storage data. INRH manages the HYDRASTA data system internally but provides no public-facing interface. The National Dam Inventory catalogued 189 dams yet no dataset has been released publicly. The only reservoir-level figures accessible online come from third-party sources such as the IHA Angola Energy 2025 portal, which publishes installed-capacity statistics rather than volumetric storage data.
Technical Accessibility
15% of total score
No machine-readable data exists in any public channel. PRODEL's website returned HTTP 503; INRH's portal returned HTTP 500; INAMET's site has a TLS certificate error. No REST API, no CSV or JSON downloads, no structured PDF time series, and no scraping-viable table was found anywhere in the official ecosystem. The internal HYDRASTA system (built with World Bank PDISA II support) is a closed institutional tool. The MINEA portal publishes only narrative news articles in HTML.
Coverage
30% of total score
Capacity-weighted (v1.3.0): 0/64,000 Mm³ = 0% (Capanda 4,350 + Laúca 5,800 + Cambambe + Gove + Matala; PRODEL publishes zero public storage data). Prior justification (preserved for context): Denominator (RTI methodology): reservoirs with capacity >10 hm³. Angola has approximately 20–25 reservoirs above this threshold, anchored by the Kwanza cascade (Capanda ~4,800 Mm³, Laúca ~5,400 Mm³, Cambambe ~570 Mm³), Caculo Cabaça (under construction), plus Matala, Gove (~2,570 Mm³), and smaller hydropower and water-supply impoundments. Zero of these have any publicly accessible storage volume or level data — PRODEL operates internal SCADA feeding HYDRASTA only. Coverage rate is 0/~22 = 0%. The 189-dam National Dam Inventory has not been released publicly. The score reflects total absence of operational reservoir data for any qualifying facility.
Historical Depth
13% of total score
No historical time series of reservoir storage is publicly accessible. INRH's HYDRASTA system has collected station data since approximately 2015, but that archive is internal. The ADHI African Database of Hydrometric Indices (1950–2018) includes some Angolan river-flow records, but these are discharge measurements at gauge stations, not reservoir storage volumes. No government source has released even a single year of machine-readable historical storage data.
Update Frequency
10% of total score
There is no publication schedule because there is no public data portal. PRODEL operates real-time SCADA systems at its plants for operational purposes, and INRH collects telemetric data from automatic hydrometric stations, but neither organisation routes any of that data to a public channel. The last date a reservoir-related data figure appeared in an official Angolan government document was a design-capacity specification for a dam under construction — not an operational reading.
Methodological Transparency
8% of total score
Coverage is 0 (no national reservoirs >10 hm³ with public data). Quality dimensions for the COVERED subset are therefore 0 by definition. Original notes preserved below: No measurement methodology is published for reservoir monitoring. INRH's organic statute (Presidential Decree 118/21) describes its mandate to inventory and classify water bodies but contains no technical standards for how storage volumes are measured or quality-controlled. The 2016 PRODEL–INRH data-sharing protocol is referenced in World Bank project documents but has not been published in full. Angola has contracted consultants to develop a National Plan for Dam Safety (via World Bank RECLIMA), but no methodology document has been released as of the evaluation date. The only partial credit is that Angola submitted SDG 6.5.1 IWRM questionnaire data (scoring 62% in 2023), indicating some institutional framework exists.
Language and Usability
5% of total score
All official Angolan water and energy institutions operate exclusively in Portuguese. No English-language data interface exists, and even the Portuguese interfaces are largely non-functional (PRODEL 503, INRH 500, INAMET TLS error as of mid-2026). The IHA and World Bank publish some English-language project summaries about Angola's hydropower sector, but these contain no operational storage data. The score reflects the minimal partial credit for Portuguese-language institutional content that at least exists in HTML form on MINEA's site, even if it contains no quantitative reservoir data.
Evaluator notes
Angola holds some of sub-Saharan Africa's most significant hydropower infrastructure — Capanda (520 MW), Laúca (2,071 MW), Cambambe (rebuilt 2014), and Caculo Cabaça (2,172 MW, under construction) on the Kwanza River represent a combined regulated storage of approximately 7,500 hm³. Yet this hydraulic wealth is matched by almost total opacity on reservoir operations. No public portal, API, or data file publishes current or historical storage volumes for any Angolan dam. The institutions nominally responsible — INRH, PRODEL, MINEA — each have internal monitoring capacity: INRH runs 37 hydrometric stations feeding the HYDRASTA database; PRODEL manages six stations at its dams under a 2016 inter-agency protocol. None of these data flows reach the public domain. The institutional framework is nascent rather than absent. INRH was only established in 2015, and the World Bank's PDISA II project (completed ~2020) built the hydrometric station network and HYDRASTA system from scratch. The successor RECLIMA project ($300M, approved 2022, co-financed by AFD) explicitly targets improved hydrometeorological data availability as a component, and Angola has commissioned a National Plan for Dam Safety — suggesting the country is aware of its transparency deficit and is investing to close it. An SDG 6.5.1 IWRM score of 62% (2023, above the global average of 57%) confirms that the policy and institutional skeleton is in place, but operational data publication has not yet followed. For RTI purposes Angola scores at the very bottom of the transparency ladder. The primary bottleneck is data availability and technical accessibility: even willing researchers cannot access storage data because no channel exists to serve it. The Kwanza cascade is a critical hydropower system in a country where 80% of electricity comes from hydro, yet drought risk and inter-annual flow variability (mean annual Kwanza flow ranging from 312 m³/s in dry years to over 1,000 m³/s in wet years) make real-time reservoir monitoring urgently needed. Until INRH or PRODEL opens even a minimal public data feed, Angola will remain a transparency outlier relative to its hydropower ambitions.
Evaluated by Jaime Delgado · 2026-09-15 · Methodology v1.3.0