The operation and economic profitability of modern energy systems is constrained by the availability of renewable energy and water resources. Thermal power plants need water for cooling purposes while hydropower plants are fuelled by the water to generate electricity. Furthermore, extremely high shares of renewables impact the stability of the power system and increase the operational and flexibility needs. Water shortages and increased water temperatures in rivers across the globe have regularly occurred in the last years. This has led to temporary shutdowns, activation of load shedding procedures, financial losses, increased wear and tear of the power plants and ultimately less reliable and more costly systems. The operation of power systems directly impacts the quantity and quality of water resources. The combined effect of lower water availability due to climate change, higher demand and increased water consumption for non-energy and energy needs may cause problems in Africa. In most African power systems hydropower is a dominant renewable energy resource, and interconnection capacities are usually limited ppr unreliable. This paper describes the modelling framework for analysing the water-power nexus in the Northern, Eastern and Central Africa Power Pools. The proposed modelling framework includes soft linking between three models. The LISFLOOD model is used to generate hydrological inputs, the TEMBA model is used for assessing the long-term expansion planning and the Dispa-SET model is used for mid-term hydrothermal coordination and optimal unit commitment and power dispatch of the system. The results show that the proposed modelling framework yields simulation results comparable to historical values, despite the data-related limitations, replicating the available statistics to great extent. Furthermore. The simulation was able to provide hourly time series of electricity generation at plant level in a robust way. We show that all analysed African power pools heavily rely on the availability of water resources. As a consequence, in the long term, the dependence of the power system on water resources could become even more important to meet the increasing electricity demand in the analysed power pools.