Flooding in Informal Communities: Residents’ Response Strategies to Flooding and their Sustainability Implications in Old Fadama, Accra

Flood vulnerabilities and eviction threats are challenges informal settlement residents encounter in urban Africa. Although recent literature posits emerging residents’ coping and adaptive capacity to flooding, research on African cities is scarce. To address such a knowledge gap, this chapter explores micro-level flood response strategies in Old Fadama—one of Ghana’s informal settlements—and their sustainability implications of providing residents with long-term relief from flood vulnerabilities. Findings reveal that residents’ awareness and experience with floods have led to some individual and community-level responses. Nonetheless, perennial flooding in the community is indicative of the limits of such response strategies in tackling flood vulnerability. This situation is compounded by local government threats of evictions after flood disasters. Together, these undermine the sustainability of residents emerging coping and adaptive capacities. This chapter, therefore, argues for an integrated community-based urban flood management approach that engages informal settlement residents’ response strategies and their socio-ecological circumstances to provide sustainable pathways to traverse their flood vulnerabilities.