Dakar suburbs strive to turn floodwaters from foe to friend

YEUMBEUL NORD, Senegal: Balla Fall, the newly elected chairman of a neighbourhood committee managing a project to protect residents from flooding, had a big job ahead of him: mobilising local people to clean up drainage reservoirs clogged with rubbish and tall grass.

But the builder in his early 40s was confident.

"Every time there is a need, there´s a good turnout," he said on the afternoon the committee met to plan the operation.

For a week in late September, around 35 inhabitants of Béne Barack neighbourhood helped clear 17 tonnes of rubbish from several basins.

Now the water can flow properly again, security has improved around the basin edges - they had had been a risky place to walk at night - and there´s less risk of disease from dirty water, according to the Dakar-based Consortium for Social and Economic Research (CRES), which is leading the project.

Involving the community is central to an urban flood management project called "Live with Water" (Vivre avec l´Eau), funded by the British government.

It aims to benefit some 920,000 people, mainly in the eastern suburbs of Dakar.

"They play a hands-on role in improving their environment," said Nafissatou Baldé, project manager at CRES.

The project aims to prevent flooding of houses, shops and streets during the rainy season by putting in drainage infrastructure, while using the evacuated water for activities such as cultivating herb gardens on the basins´ banks.

"The goal is that the water becomes a friend rather than an enemy," Baldé said.

When properly managed, annual rainy season deluges should no longer damage people´s assets or force them out of their homes, she added. Yeumbeul Nord, a municipality on the eastern outskirts of Dakar, is no stranger to flooding.

When seasonal floods hit in 2005, half its 82 neighbourhoods were affected. But 10 years later, only 12 were flooded, thanks to the combined efforts of the government, municipal authorities and development groups, local officials said.

As growing numbers of people have migrated from rural parts of Senegal into this low-lying district bordering the sea, homes have been built in flood-prone areas, putting them at risk. The main problem now is protecting roads from flooding in some 20 neighbourhoods, he added.

"We don´t have much money to deal with floods," he said, although the town hall does its best to deploy vans and motorised pumps whenever there is heavy rain.

"I think the sustainable solution is to equip the roads with drains and gravity systems."

Béne Barack´s main street, Thomas Sankara, which has a market running along one side, benefited from new drainage and road paving in the pilot phase of the Live with Water project, which began in 2014.It is part of a major UK-backed programme to build resilience to climate extremes and disasters in 13 countries in Africa and Asia, known as BRACED.