Households’ readiness and community-based organisations’ role in flood management: The case of Freetown City’s coastal area

Abstract

Flooding is a well-known extreme climate event affecting coastal settlements around the world. It is the principal climate-related disaster encountered by residents of Portee and Rukupa, coastal slums in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The impacts of floods in these slums have been exacerbated by the lack of effective control measures to address the disaster. One reason for this ineffectiveness is a lack of information about how households are ready to manage floods and the roles of community-based organisations (CBOs) in these events. Given this concern, this study examines household readiness and CBOs’ roles in flood management in Portee and Rokupa using observation, purposive, and snowball sampling techniques to study 204 households and 12 CBOs. The results show that flood-related information in the community is mostly shared verbally among residents. In addition, most households claimed not to have received support amidst flood events, whereas CBOs within the area claimed the opposite. As such, we recommend that future studies look at household perceptions of vulnerability and willingness to take risk-reduction actions. This study encourages community members to strengthen inter-community and organisational learning, feedback, and support systems and adopt a “no wait on the government principle” for flood management.

Keywords

• climate change
• flood risk
• household resilience
• informal settlements
• slum hazard
• vulnerability