Mohammed Abubakari

Cities and Floods Mohammed Abubakari

This book examines the major effects of perennial flooding on households living in Alajo, an informal suburb of Accra, the national capital of Ghana. In furtherance, it considers the factors that determine the coping strategies of households and then delve into the diverse coping strategies that have been adopted by the informal urbanites which have influenced their continual stay despite facing the risks of flooding every year. Floods are common events that confront many cities in the developing world. Ghana, a developing country, is persistently challenged with flood events, especially in its major cities. In informal Accra for instance, despite the severity of flood effects and its associated threats, poor informal residents continue to stay. As a result, these poor urban dwellers have developed local coping strategies made up of mitigation and reactive measures to manage and adapt to flood hazards through their preceding experiences. In this paper, we have embraced the Convergent Parallel Mixed Method of Case Study Design to echo and explore: (i) the major effects of preceding floods on informal households; ii) the local informal coping strategies adopted by households to mitigate and respond to flooding and its effects in the future; and iii) the determinants of the coping strategies of households which underpin their continual stay in spite of flood risks in Alajo, an urbanized suburb in Accra metropolis noted as one of the slum communities that easily floods in Ghana. Our analysis has used a mix of qualitative and quantitative data collected from both secondary and primary sources as well as a conceptualized model known as Disaster Resilience of Place (DROP). The key finding (Alajo has low degree of adaptive resilience to major floods which might occur in the future due to the lack of social learning in the coping strategies developed through several years of lessons learnt from perennial floods) and proposals (local coordination in implementing the coping strategies to flooding, state support of the local strategies and adoption of rainwater harvesting) also make contributions to managing urban floods in informal settlements in the developing world.