Abstract:
The research main objective was to assess the impacts of flood on socio-economic conditions
in Gondarzuria Woreda. To this effect, the study used mixed research design; quantitative
and qualitative. The objective of using quantitative data is to identify the socio-economic
impacts of flood and qualitative data was used to clearly show its impacts in narration. Likert
scale questions to be ranked by respondents about the major socio-economic impacts of
flooding from “Strongly agree to strongly disagree”. SPSS, MS Excel and GIS soft wares and
demonstrated using Maps, Diagrams, Graphs, Tables, and Charts processed the study data.
Mean distributions and descriptive statistics were also employed, to analyze the socioeconomic
impacts. Besides, Multi-Criteria Evaluation technique was used to assess flood
hazard. Geographic Information System designed flood hotspot hazard mapping and
accordingly, factors to flood were identified. Factors were analyzed by using ArcMap, in
order to reclassify the input images based on the FAO (2006) classification standards as
Very High (5), High (4), Moderate (3), Low (2) and very Low (1).Thus, from the analysis, it is
inferred that flooding highly affected the economic and social life of the farmers of the three
Kebeles, Firka dangure, Sihorsarwuha, and Mitirha kebeles of Gondarzuria Woreda. The
factors for flood hazard in the study area are slope, soil moisture holding capacity, elevation,
and rainfall factor. Communities to temporary migration, health influences including
farmers’ vulnerability to water born disease, due to flood of the study area, there were
human and animal deaths as well as damage of property and damage infrastructure
facilities. Thus, from this, it can conclude that flooding is a common happening in the study
area; thus, the communities have been frequently affected socially and economically by
flooding. As a result, the researcher recommended that using available resources,
government bodies and communities should design flood hazard management or watershed
management plan and deal effectively with recurrent floods and flood emergencies, an
appropriate mechanism and capacity needs to be established which will put in place at
district and local level with adequate measures to cope with flood emergencies and plan for
long-term solutions to reduce and mitigate recurrent flood damages.
