Measuring Subjective Flood Resilience in Suburban Dakar: A Before–After Evaluation of the “Live with Water” Project

Abstract

In the last decade, sub-Saharan African countries have taken various measures to plan for and adapt to floods in order to reduce exposure and its impacts on human health, livelihoods, and infrastructure. Measuring the effects of such initiatives on social resilience is challenging as it requires to combine multiple variables and indicators that embrace thematic, spatial, and temporal dimensions inherent to the resilience thinking and concept. In this research, we apply a subjective resilience indicator framework and a before-after-control-intervention (BACI) evaluation to empirically measure the impacts of the "Live with Water" (LWW) project on suburban households in Dakar, Senegal. Our framework is based on an empirically measurable resilience index that combines anticipatory, adaptive, and absorptive capacity-considered as structural dimensions-with the concept of transformative capacity-considered as a temporal reconfiguration of the first three dimensions. Our finding let us estimate that the project increased the absorptive and the anticipatory capacities by 10.6% and 4.6%, respectively. However, adaptive capacity remained unchanged. This may be explained by the fact that the project was more successful in building drainage and physical infrastructures, rather than improving multi-level organizations and strategies to cope with existing flood events. Decoupling implementation time between physical infrastructures and longer term institutional and livelihood based support could both improve projects' results and their evaluations.

When does risk become residual? A systematic review of research on flood risk management in West Africa

“…The latter finding could point towards the inadequacies of existing systems, such as open drainage facilities blocked by waste (e.g. Lokonon 2016 ; Osayomi and Oladosu 2016 ; Danso and Addo 2017 ; Schlef et al 2018 ) or having to resort to isolated efforts of flood defense structures on the house- or community-level, often in informal areas, with limited impact (Adelekan 2010 ; Schaer 2015 ; Bottazzi et al 2018 ; Adekola et al 2019 ). This was frequently mentioned in urban case studies.…”

Coping with Floods in Pikine, Senegal: An Exploration of Household Impacts and Prevention Efforts

“…The national government, however, is embarking on an ambitious plan aimed at using flood water as an economic resource. The "Living with Water" project, for example, promotes community gardens as an effective way of using excess water for economic and community good [47]. In addition to community gardens, the project emphasizes waste collection and improving public space around basins with furniture and leisure grounds.…”

Buffer-Capacity-Based Livelihood Resilience to Stressors—An Early Warning Tool and Its Application in Makueni County, Kenya

“…In this study, we operationalize the framework using the case of smallholder farmer households in Makueni County, Kenya. Since other studies have their main focus on self-organization and the capacity for learning (e.g., Ifejika Speranza et al, 2014;Bottazzi et al, 2018;Mukhovi et al, 2020), we concentrate our analysis on buffer capacity and examine its interactions with production (yields), livelihood outcomes (food security) and climate-related stressors (pests and diseases).…”