Abstract:
In sub-Saharan Africa, hydro-meteorological related disasters, such as floods,
account for the majority of the total number of natural disasters. Over the past century, floods
have affected 38 million people, claimed several lives and caused substantial economic
losses in the region. The goal of this paper is to examine how personality disposition, social
network, and socio-demographic factors mitigate the complex relationship between stressful
life experiences of floods and ocean surges and the adoption of coping strategies among
coastal communities in Nigeria and Tanzania. Generalized linear models (GLM) were fitted
to cross-sectional survey data on 1003 and 1253 individuals in three contiguous coastal areas
in Nigeria and Tanzania, respectively. Marked differences in the type of coping strategies
were observed across the two countries. In Tanzania, the zero-order relationships between
adoption of coping strategies and age, employment and income disappeared at the multivariate level. Only experience of floods in the past year and social network resources were significant
predictors of participants’ adoption of coping strategies, unlike in Nigeria, where a plethora of
factors such as experience of ocean surges in the past one year, personality disposition, age,
education, experience of flood in the past one year, ethnicity, income, housing quality and
employment status were still statistically significant at the multivariate level. Our findings
suggest that influence of previous experience on adoption of coping strategies is spatially
ubiquitous. Consequently, context-specific policies aimed at encouraging the adoption of
flood-related coping strategies in vulnerable locations should be designed based on local
needs and orientation
