As cities have grown, builders have thrown up concrete walls haphazardly with little thought about providing drainage, making it harder for water to find a clear path to the sea
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskSimilar events regularly occur across the region. Recent flooding and landslides also killed eight people in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. In June flooding killed 12 people in Abidjan, the commercial capital of Ivory Coast. Floods in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, claimed another seven lives. Even when they are not deadly, city floods ruin lives and livelihoods.
Some of the most denuded—and thus drenched—places are coastal cities such as Freetown and Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. Yet areas deep inland are also at risk. Some 340,000 people have been hit by recent flooding in Chad. Worryingly, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts there will be heavier downfalls more often across most of Africa as the planet warms up.
Unplanned urbanisation can also put more people in harm’s way. Fully 40% of the people who settled in the outskirts of Dakar between 1988 and 2008 made their homes in areas that are at significant risk of flooding or coastal erosion. Flooding imposes economic costs, as well as human ones. Even normal rain in Dakar creates a swampy gridlock across the city and badly slows business—apart from the few brave hawkers who wade between stationary cars selling their wares. The World Bank found that in 2017 flooding in coastal areas caused damage worth almost 3% ofin Ivory Coast and 1.4% in Senegal. One study found that families hit by natural disasters in Senegal were 25% more likely to fall into poverty.