Cairo  - Water resource ministers from countries in the Nile River Basin on Wednesday outlined 24 joint projects worth 1.4 billion dollars at the close of a four-day meeting in Egypt.

Egypt's Minister of Irrigation and Water Resources Mohammed Nasr al-Din Allam told the official Middle East News Agency that the projects would seek to use water from the Nile more efficiently for agriculture and reduce wastage by 95 per cent.

The projects include improving irrigation techniques in the west of the Nile Delta and a joint Sudanese-Ethiopian hydroelectric scheme. A water conservation programme in the Nile Equatorial Lakes region, which includes Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi, was also agreed to.

The projects are expected to cost 800 million dollars.

The remaining 600 million dollars have been set aside for projects whose feasibility is still being being studied.

The ministers at the meeting held in the Egyptian city of Alexandra in the Nile Delta also agreed to extend negotiations on a new water-sharing pact for another six months. Egypt and Sudan rejected changes to the current pact governing Egypt's share of the Nile waters.

Under a 1959 agreement with Sudan, Egypt is allocated 55.5 billion cubic metres of water from the river a year.

The Nile Basin Initiative was formally launched in 1999 "to develop Nile Basin water resources in a sustainable and equitable way to ensure prosperity, security, and peace for all its peoples."(dpa)