Discussion Paper No. 218 of 2020 on Households Coping Mechanisms and Resilience to the Impacts of Droughts and Floods in Kenya

Abstract

The frequency and severity of droughts and floods hazards are projected to increase with climate change. Households are affected through various mechanisms including income and asset losses that translate to other undesirable socio-economic outcomes such as poor health, reduced human capital development and increased poverty. These socio-economic impacts pose threats to the realization of development goals including those anchored in the Kenya Vision 2030, the Big Four Agenda of the Kenyan government and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) commitments. Insights on how households cope with and build resilience to the impacts of droughts and floods are important policy imperatives. While there is a range of coping mechanisms that includes informal measures such as dependence on social networks and market-based measures such as the use of formal financial instruments, the former is generally shown to be less effective due to covariate and recurrent nature of climate change induced hazards. Despite such limitations, there are concerns Kenyan households largely depend on non-market informal coping mechanisms, which if left unaddressed will likely result to significant socio-economic costs. The aims of this study were to draw lessons from review of selected interventions and establish how households cope with the impacts of droughts and floods, focusing on various typology including finance coping mechanisms and non-finance coping mechanisms that are further disaggregated into formal and informal coping measures. The study also aimed at establishing factors that support household resilience to the impacts of droughts and floods, focusing on the roles of finance and non-finance coping mechanisms and access to climate information.