ISSN: 2578-4994
Authors: Balgah AR, Mue Nji T*, Buchenrieder G and Yenshu Vubo E
The recent escalation of natural disasters globally has stimulated a burgeoning of theoretical and empirical scholarship on the subject. While the disaster management discourses in high income countries largely focus on resilience and adaptation, developing countries are still grappling with vulnerability and coping issues. This trend has been frequently attributed to the failure of formal (state and market) disaster management institutions in many developing countries. Formality failure provides justification for including informality in the disaster narrative in developing countries. This contribution explores determinants for adopting formal or informal risk management strategies with regard to droughts in Cameroon, using a random sample of 1208 drought-affected Cameroonian households. Data is based on a structured questionnaire developed following the World Bank’s Social Risk Management Framework. Quantitative data are supplemented by 64 in-depth interviews and 17 focus group discussions. A larger proportion of the sample depended on informal than formal strategies to cope with drought effects (78 percent and 22 percent respectively). Binary logistic regression analysis revealed that the age of the household head and perceived severity positively and significantly influenced these decisions (p = 0.001). Due to distrust of state management as a result of previous corruption experience, victims only appropriated state support when survival was a priority or informality was insufficient for coping. We conclude with the need to progressively include informality into the coping package, at least for the studied drought-affected Cameroonian households.
Keywords: Coping Strategies; Drought-affected Households; Northern Cameroon; Social Risk Management Framework
