Improving flood resilience in the Dakar suburbs
In the suburbs of Dakar, flooding has developed over the last three decades as a result of several factors: demographic growth and rural exodus leading to the spontaneous occupation of former semi-wetlands; the end of groundwater pumping for water supply due to pollution; the end of the “great Sahelian drought” of the 1970s and the gradual return to normal rainfall.
Although climate projections are struggling to converge at the local level, extreme events are expected to intensify. The issue of flooding has risen on the political agenda and the responses provided by the public authorities have diversified: emergency measures, evacuation and/or resettlement of affected neighbourhoods, construction of drainage networks, basins and pumps, possibly coupled with the restructuring of informal settlements. More recently, ’integrated management’ projects combine planning, design and implementation of infrastructure and capacity building of public actors.
Nevertheless, support measures for the improvement and reconstruction of individual housing affected by floods are rare or non-existent in Senegal. The Integrated Flood Risk Management project (PING-GIRI) aims to extend the logic of intervention on housing (carried out within the framework of the housing renovation/rehabilitation programme) to community works co-designed by the inhabitants, the neighbourhood, the local authorities and the State’s technical services.
In this programme led by GRET and coordinated by urbaSEN, urbaMonde is in charge of defining the operating methods of the urban renewal fund, innovations in the field of ICTs (inhabitants’ database and cartography) and feeds the innovation and capitalisation process.
Inondations-Dakar.org, an open database for flood risk management in Dakar
Launched in 2019 in collaboration with urbaSEN and GRET, the open data platform Inondations-Dakar.org gathers, makes available and popularises the knowledge of the different actors involved in flood risk management in Dakar.
In the context of recurrent flooding, a lot of data is being collected and numerous research projects and publications are being carried out. Unfortunately, this important work remains essentially invisible and inaccessible. This reality represents a deadweight loss for development actors and populations.
The platform Inondations-Dakar.org is collaborative and aims at creating a community of users, engaged in flood risk management and sustainable urban development.
