Impacts of Flooding on Socio-Economic Conditions of Gondar Zurya Woreda, Amahara region, Ethiopia

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.