ASSESSMENT OF COMMUNITY RESILIENCE TO FLOOD DISASTER IN KIRI DAM’S CATCHMENT, ADAMAWA STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

Since Kiri reservoir was impounded, the catchment has been reported to have witnessed
serious annual flood disaster since 2012, especially in 2012, 2015, 2018, 2019 and 2020, which
has resulted into loss of lives and properties and displacement of several people. While flood
vulnerability expresses the impact of disturbance on the communities, resilience describes the
capacity of the communities to absorb the shock. Hence, the need for the study of community
resilience to flood in the area. Three communities were purposively sampled based on the
frequency, intensity and extent of floods obtained during the reconnaissance survey. That is,
Banjiram, in Guyuk LGA in the western side, Gombiyel in Shelleng LGA at the eastern side of
the dam’s reservior. and Bare in Numan LGA at the downstream of the reservoir. The
framework of community resilience by Batica et al, 2013 which consists of five dimensions:
Built Environment, Organization and Institute, Science and Technology, Natural Environment
and Social Economics that was adopted for this study. Questionnaire on community resilience
to flood were set for all the indicators of the dimensions with value ‘1’ as the least resilience
and ‘4’ for the highest resilience. The threshold was determined so that indicators with their
values below the threshold were dropped, while those that are equal to or greater were selected
for the study. The mean of the indicator (the higher the value of the mean of a community, the
higher the resilience to flood disaster) were weighted and ranked using AHP in order to
determine the level of resilience of each of the indicators of all the dimensions. Banjiram has
the highest resilience to flood with a mean of 4.36 followed by Bare community (2.35) while
Gombiyel was the least with a mean of 2.28. The indicator with the least resilience in the three
communities was house structures with percentage weights of 2.19, 3.44 and 3.61 in Bare,
Banjiram and Gombiyel respectively. Among the dimensions in the three communities, socioeconomic with vulnerable population and individual capability have the highest resilience with
an overall weight of 0.437 and 0.287 respectively. Since built environment and natural
environment were the least two influences of strategies. It was recommended that the two
strategies be strengthened in all the communities