Community resilience to flooding in Benin: local strategies and constraints in the municipalities of Cotonou, Malanville and Bonou

ABSTRACT

Graphical Abstract This diagram highlights the importance of institutional and partnership support in removing constraints and strengthening local adaptive capacity in flood risk management. Conceptual diagram: a box labelled "Flooding" leads to "Endogenous solutions", which interact with "Constraints" and are reinforced by "Institutional and partnership supports", together producing "Community resilience (anticipate, adapt, recover)". Arrows show that institutional support removes constraints and strengthens local adaptive capacity.

This study analyses the barriers to community resilience to flooding in the municipalities of Cotonou, Malanville and Bonou (Benin) and proposes operational strategies to overcome them. It adopts a mixed-methods design combining a literature review, meteorological and hydrological records, surveys of 384 households per municipality, interviews, direct observations and focus group discussions. Data were analysed using descriptive, bivariate and multivariate statistics in SPSS, and spatial analyses in QGIS. Results reveal diverse endogenous resilience practices, including raising and rehabilitating housing, cleaning drainage channels, digging evacuation trenches, using canoes for evacuation, building wooden bridges and earthen bunds, storing sandbags and adapting livelihoods. However, their effectiveness depends on overcoming informational, technical and financial constraints. Financial constraints were reported by 87% of households in Cotonou, 79% in Malanville and 98% in Bonou, and informational constraints by 97%, 83% and 54%, respectively, revealing marked territorial disparities. Strengthening community resilience requires equitable access to information, stronger local technical capacities, and financial support and economic empowerment of households. Combined with integrated flood risk management, these actions are essential to sustainably reduce the vulnerability of exposed communities.