Coping with Floods in the Savannah Region of Ghana

Abstract

Human interaction with environment can generate human vulnerability to floods surpassing household and community resistance and resilience. This study is mainly focussed on studying how reducing access to and deteriorating conditions of key assets has increased human vulnerability to floods in the Savannah. The study was used to demonstrate how demographic characteristics of people affect ability to access key assets to cope with floods. Two towns highly vulnerable to floods were selected in Savannah region, data was collected, and analysed. Both qualitative and quantitative analysis was undertaken and presented using descriptive and inferential statistics. The chi square test was used to establish a relationship between variables observed. The results of the analysis showed that most of them lacked access to key assets, which affects their ability to anticipate, resist, and recover from floods. Most vulnerable groups were female and aged, rules areas more vulnerable than urban centre. The study concludes that, there is need of understanding how demographic characteristic affect ability to access key assets and increase human vulnerability to floods and establish and effective program to reduce this.