Changements climatiques: impact des inondations sur le bien-être des personnes handicapées et les stratégies d'adaptation dans la commune de Sô-Ava, République du Bénin

Abstract

The climatic variations occurring worldwide over the last few years have resulted in severe consequences of which the cyclic flooding. These natural catastrophes diversely impact on local population, mainly disabled people in flooding prone communities. However, existing information indicated a paucity of scientific data on how the life quality of disabled people is being impacted by flooding. As such, this research was set up to fill that gap. It evaluated the impact of inundations on the wellbeing of disabled people in the municipality of Sô-Ava, one of the flooding prone municipalities in Southern Benin. Data were collected in the seven districts of the municipality with the exploratory sequential mixed method approach. The approach includes the use of qualitative and quantitative techniques to collect data. Gathered information was analyzed following the standard methods of data analysis including the analysis of variance (ANOVA), the principal component analysis (PCA), the linear models, etc. The relative frequencies of citation (RFC) were also calculated pour assess the influence of the listed diseases on the disabled peoples’ heath. Results showed that the considered life attributes (health, activities, security and social relationships) were affected at the same manner with the three types of disability considered. Likewise, the heath of the disabled people irrespective of the category is affected during the inundations (IRI=0.85). The category of infectious diseases is the most worrisome to disabled people in the area with 25% of relative frequency of citation. Concerning the adaptation strategies, analyses show that the investigated disabled people have no adaptation strategy during this period. However, they adopt immobilization and migration as a way of adverting the impact of the flooding. On the other hand, stakeholders’ responses during the period are restricted to sensitization, food donation and scholarly items donations. Others also donate mosquito nets, medicines etc.