page_title: Lake Victoria
section_title: Nalubaale Dam
hierarchical_section_title: Lake Victoria / Nalubaale Dam
caption_attribution_description: Nalubaale Power Station (formerly Owen Falls Dam) in Jinja, Uganda on the Victoria Nile
context_page_description: Lake Victoria is one of the African Great Lakes.
  The lake was named after Queen Victoria by the explorer John Hanning Speke, in his reports—the first Briton to document it. Speke accomplished this in 1858, while on an expedition with Richard Francis Burton to locate the source of the Nile River. This expedition was financially sponsored by the Royal Geographic Society.
  With a surface area of approximately 59,947 square kilometres, Lake Victoria is Africa's largest lake by area, the world's largest tropical lake, and the world's second largest fresh water lake by surface area after Lake Superior in North America. In terms of volume, Lake Victoria is the world's ninth largest continental lake, containing about 2,424 cubic kilometres of water. Lake Victoria occupies a shallow depression in Africa. The lake has a maximum depth of between 80 and 84 metres and an average depth of 40 metres. Its catchment area covers 169,858 square kilometres. The lake has a shoreline of 7,142 kilometres when digitized at the 1:25,000 level, with islands constituting 3.7 percent of this length. The lake's area is divided among three countries: Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania.
context_section_description: The only outflow for Lake Victoria is at Jinja, Uganda, where it forms the Victoria Nile. The water since at least 12,000 years ago drained across a natural rock weir. In 1952, engineers acting for the government of British Uganda blasted out the weir and reservoir to replace it with an artificial barrage to control the level of the lake and reduce the gradual erosion of the rock weir. A standard for mimicking the old rate of outflow called the "agreed curve" was established, setting the maximum flow rate at 300 to 1,700 cubic metres per second (392–2,224 cu yd/sec) depending on the lake's water level.
  In 2002, Uganda completed a second hydroelectric complex in the area, the Kiira Hydroelectric Power Station, with World Bank assistance. By 2006, the water levels in Lake Victoria had reached an 80-year low, and Daniel Kull, an independent hydrologist living in Nairobi, Kenya, calculated that Uganda was releasing about twice as much water as is allowed under the agreement, and was primarily responsible for recent drops in the lake's level.
caption: The Nalubaale Hydroelectric Power Station in Njeru, Uganda.
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