Livelihood resilience in the face of recurring floods: an empirical evidence from Northwest Ethiopia

Background The recent trend of increasing incidents of floods in Ethiopia is disrupting the livelihoods of a significant proportion of the country’s population. This study assesses the factors that shape the resilience and the vulnerability of rural households in the face of recurring floods by taking the case of Dembia district of Northwest Ethiopia as one of the flood-prone areas in the country. Results The data for the study were collected through a survey of 284 households, two focus group discussions, and 12 key informant interviews. Principal Component Analysis and simple linear regression were used for the analysis. The former served both for data reduction and identification of the dominant factors that explain resilience to recurring flood hazards while the latter was used to check the relationship between resilience and vulnerability. Findings indicate that access and use of livelihood resources such as size of farmlands, availability of farm oxen, credit as well as ability to draw help from social networks were found to be the most important factors that determine the resilience of households to floods. Similarly, the coping strategies employed by households were found to be constrained mainly by the scale and impact of the recent floods and lack or shortage of basic infrastructural and social facilities. Conclusions The results confirmed that most of the traditional coping strategies employed by households failed to effectively help households offset the impacts of flooding. Given the livelihood context of smallholder farming system in the studied area, context specific institutional interventions such as the integrated use of both safety nets and cargo nets may help communities to overcome livelihood predicaments associated with the recurrent flood disasters. This implies that policy should focus more on addressing the factors that expose people to flood disasters and shape their resilience, rather than focusing on short-term emergency responses which seems to be the norm in much of the flood affected areas in the country.