Early alert and community involvement: approach for disaster risk reduction in Rwanda

Natural disasters' socioeconomic and environmental losses are predicted to rise, unless early warning, full stakeholders and community involvement in the mitigation, adaptation and risk reduction are squarely engaged. The objective of this study is to assess the impact of early alert and community involvement in disaster risk reduction in Nyabihu District, Western Rwanda. A quota sampling method was employed to obtain a sample of 240 households from 12 sectors of Nyabihu District in 2015. A structured questionnaire was used, and the field data collected were computed by using SPSS16.0 for Windows. The results indicated that, as stated by respondents, the frequently experienced disasters are floods (51.25%) and landslides (42.08%). However, as asserted by 68% of informants, disaster-related information is communicated through radio channels after the occurrence, while 29% of them declared that disaster information is disseminated before occurrence, which implies the rising level of risk vulnerability and incidences to the community due to lack of early warning. A lower community participation in disaster risk preparedness and mitigation was noticed (6.2%) while 31.6% mentioned taking part in activities aimed at coping with the aftermath (adaptation). Moreover, disaster risk reduction government policies are preferentially implemented (42.9%) other than considering the community's knowledge (14.1%). To halt the gradual increase in disasters' associated risks and losses, it is suggested to introduce disaster-related training across the community, introduce disaster courses from elementary schools and integrate the community in decision-making process.