Early alert and community involvement: approach for disaster risk reduction in Rwanda

Lamek Nahayo, Christophe Mupenzi, Alphonse Kayiranga, Fidele Karamage, Felix Ndayisaba, Enan Muhire Nyesheja and Lanhai Li ()
Additional contact information
Lamek Nahayo: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Christophe Mupenzi: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Alphonse Kayiranga: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Fidele Karamage: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Felix Ndayisaba: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Enan Muhire Nyesheja: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Lanhai Li: Chinese Academy of Sciences

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2017, vol. 86, issue 2, No 1, 505-517

Abstract: Abstract Natural disasters’ socioeconomic and environmental losses are predicted to rise, unless early warning, full stakeholders and community involvement in the mitigation, adaptation and risk reduction are squarely engaged. The objective of this study is to assess the impact of early alert and community involvement in disaster risk reduction in Nyabihu District, Western Rwanda. A quota sampling method was employed to obtain a sample of 240 households from 12 sectors of Nyabihu District in 2015. A structured questionnaire was used, and the field data collected were computed by using SPSS16.0 for Windows. The results indicated that, as stated by respondents, the frequently experienced disasters are floods (51.25%) and landslides (42.08%). However, as asserted by 68% of informants, disaster-related information is communicated through radio channels after the occurrence, while 29% of them declared that disaster information is disseminated before occurrence, which implies the rising level of risk vulnerability and incidences to the community due to lack of early warning. A lower community participation in disaster risk preparedness and mitigation was noticed (6.2%) while 31.6% mentioned taking part in activities aimed at coping with the aftermath (adaptation). Moreover, disaster risk reduction government policies are preferentially implemented (42.9%) other than considering the community’s knowledge (14.1%). To halt the gradual increase in disasters’ associated risks and losses, it is suggested to introduce disaster-related training across the community, introduce disaster courses from elementary schools and integrate the community in decision-making process.

Keywords: Community involvement; Disaster risk reduction; Early alert; Nyabihu District; Rwanda (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11069-016-2702-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:nathaz:v:86:y:2017:i:2:d:10.1007_s11069-016-2702-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11069

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-016-2702-5

Access Statistics for this article

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards is currently edited by Thomas Glade, Tad S. Murty and Vladimír Schenk

More articles in Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards from Springer, International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().