H1 2026 Evaluation
Libya Reservoir Transparency
F2Opaque — Ranked #135 out of 167 countries
weight 30%
weight 20%
weight 15%
weight 13%
weight 10%
weight 8%
weight 5%
Primary source evaluated
Great Man-Made River Authority (GMRA) — no public data portal identified
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man-Made_RiverDimension breakdown
Data Availability
20% of total score
Libya has no significant conventional surface storage reservoirs. The country's primary water infrastructure is the Great Man-Made River (GMMR), a vast fossil-groundwater pipeline network extracting from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System in the south and delivering 6.5 million m³/day to northern cities. Some wadi dams exist for flood control (e.g., Wadi Megenin near Tripoli). The Great Man-Made River Authority (GMRA) does not publish any hydrological monitoring data. Post-2011 conflict severely disrupted institutional capacity; Libya has operated under a split-governance situation (Tripoli-based GNU vs. Benghazi-based eastern government) with no unified data institution.
Technical Accessibility
15% of total score
No machine-readable data, API, or downloadable datasets exist from GMRA, GECOL, or any Libyan government body for water storage or reservoir levels. The GMMR's operational data is held internally and has never been published in a machine-readable format accessible to the public or the international research community.
Coverage
30% of total score
Libya's water system centres on fossil groundwater pipelines rather than surface reservoirs, so RTI coverage is structurally limited. The GMMR terminus reservoirs (the largest holds approximately 24 million m³) represent Libya's closest analogue to storage reservoirs, but no public monitoring data exists for them. Wadi dams are entirely absent from any public data system.
Historical Depth
13% of total score
Some historical GMMR project documentation exists in CIA declassified records and academic literature, providing engineering data from the 1980s–1990s construction phases. However, no operational historical time series of water levels or flow volumes is publicly accessible from Libyan institutions. Post-2011 conflict disrupted any institutional continuity that may have existed.
Update Frequency
10% of total score
No regular publication cycle for water data. Libya's split governance since 2011 and ongoing security challenges have meant that no unified national institution publishes periodic hydrological bulletins. GECOL, the electricity utility, similarly does not publish hydropower reservoir data.
Methodological Transparency
8% of total score
No published measurement methodology, monitoring standards, or quality-control documentation exists from any Libyan government source. The GMMR was engineered with external contractors (Korean, European) whose technical documentation is proprietary. No Libya-produced methodological framework for water monitoring has been made public.
Language and Usability
5% of total score
Arabic is the official language of Libya. Arabic is a major world language with large international readership, but its non-Latin script and the absence of any English or French parallel interface on Libyan government sites means that data, were any published, would face a moderate accessibility barrier for non-Arabic-speaking international users. The score reflects Arabic's international standing while acknowledging the absence of any multilingual government data infrastructure.
Evaluator notes
Libya presents a unique case in the RTI: the country's water infrastructure is dominated not by surface reservoirs but by the Great Man-Made River, the world's largest groundwater extraction and pipeline system. Conceived under Gaddafi and built between 1984 and the 2000s, the GMMR supplies 70% of Libya's freshwater by pumping fossil water from the Saharan Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System through over 1,300 wells and thousands of kilometres of pipeline. This infrastructure falls outside the RTI's reservoir-storage definition but represents a massive water transparency challenge of its own: the fossil water is being depleted with no publicly available monitoring of aquifer levels or extraction rates. For the RTI specifically, Libya's small wadi dams and GMMR terminal storage reservoirs score at the floor of the index. Post-2011 conflict and the ongoing split between internationally recognised and Benghazi-based governments have left institutions like GMRA and GECOL without the stability or mandate to publish hydrological data. Libya's September 2023 flooding disaster — when Storm Daniel caused catastrophic dam failures at Wadi Derna, killing over 11,000 people — highlighted the catastrophic consequences of opaque dam management. That disaster involved ageing wadi dams whose structural condition was unknown to the public and whose failure was not anticipated by any functioning early-warning system.
Evaluated by Jaime Delgado · 2026-09-15 · Methodology v1.3.0