Zambezi Region with the United Kingdom. Leo von Caprivi arranged for the Caprivi strip to be annexed to German South West Africa in order to give Germany access to the Zambezi River as part of the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty. The German motivation behind the swap was to acquire a strip of land linking German South West Africa with the Zambezi River, providing easy access to Tanganyika (Tanzania) and an outlet to the Indian Ocean. Unfortunately for the Germans, the British colonisation of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe and Zambia) stopped them well upstream of Victoria Falls, which proved a considerable barrier to navigation on the Zambezi.
Zambezi River System Action Plan is a culmination of a UN commission, to focus on the projection that the demand for the basins water resources would increase. This competition creates negative utilization, and inefficient use of resources for all these countries in a profitable manner. Early negotiations of ZACPLAN started in the early 1980s to come up with goals to prioritize in utilizing the Zambezi River Basin. A listing of goals in the form of category I project, and category II project were devised. Initial discussions relating to the category I and category II projects were initially disagreed upon, as political relations between resources, and